by Scott Mackay
Here was a glove, looked like a brand-new one, up in a tree, and it was as if this glove had an invisible thread connecting it all the way back to the corpse of Edgar Lau, a thread tugging at Gilbert’s sensibility, forcing his pale blue eyes to squint in speculation, making him forget the rain as it peppered his cheek with small close drops. He opened the gate and went into the backyard. He reached up and took the glove down. A brand-new beige Isotoner. For the right hand. A man’s glove? Soaking wet on the outside, yes, definitely drenched on the outside, the beige darkened like a damp tea leaf. But was it wet on the inside? He looked around the backyard, thinking he might see the other glove, then looked up at the house, a crumbling red brick row house, narrow, built in the 1890s, sagging to the left, a crooked house. But was there a crooked man inside? He felt the inside of the Isotoner with his fingers.
Dry.
He smelled the glove, thought he detected a faint whiff of gunpowder, a wayward hint of a discharged weapon.
He spent some time searching for the other glove but couldn’t find it anywhere.
He walked up the narrow path and banged on the back door. A minute later an elderly Chinese man answered. The man had something wrong with his left eye; it bulged strangely, was red around the rim, and in the dim light of the mudroom looked faintly reptilian. Gilbert presented his badge and identification.
“Anybody in this house lose a glove?” he asked.
The Chinese man looked at him without answering, as if Gilbert had just recited some arcane bit of liturgy from an unknown religion. Then the man called down the hall in Cantonese, his voice squeezed and nasal, sounding more like a woman’s voice. A much younger man, Chinese, came to the door in a white undershirt, jeans, and muddy construction boots, his mouth open in inquiry, holding three spark plugs in his hand.
“Yes?” he said.
“Anybody lose a glove?” Gilbert asked again. The question, to Gilbert’s ears, sounded sadly comical, especially against the enormity of that pool of blood back at the apartment. Gilbert saw the man needed an explanation. “I’m police.”
The man looked at the glove. The situation was bizarre, a page out of absurdist theater, a homicide detective going door to door asking about lost gloves, as if the problem of that pool of blood back at the apartment could be solved only if he settled the question of this glove first. The young Chinese man looked scared, as if he might have a half dozen illegal immigrants hiding in the house.
“No,” he said, looking at the glove nervously. “Nobody lose glove.”
Eliminating possibilities. “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.”
Wet on the outside, dry on the inside, and up in a tree. Bizarre. Gilbert shook his head. Too bizarre.
Two
Gilbert walked back to Edgar Lau’s apartment. He climbed the metal stairs slowly, his knees bothering him. Was it really arthritis? Forty-nine, and he had arthritis? He didn’t like to think about it. He didn’t want to take big enteric-coated aspirins for the rest of his life. He had a pair of lungs, still had the lungs, did twenty lengths at Leaside Pool three days a week, but his long legs were starting to creak, and he finally had to admit that maybe he was mortal after all, that he was going to have to accept the constant dull ache as an unwanted guest, and that maybe he was going to have to give up playing inter-squad baseball this summer.
The CSU recorded the crime scene—tape measures out, cameras flashing, dusting unshelved books for prints. Edgar looked paler, colder, and his eyes stared like dull gray stones, still gazing at the French doors, but no longer interested in them, as if such earthly portals could never mean anything to him again. Gilbert opened his briefcase, the scarred soldier of countless homicides, took out an evidence bag, and slipped the glove inside. He held the glove up to the light and had a closer look. No blood. But what about gunshot residue? Had he really smelled something on the glove? The lab techs on the sixth floor would definitely have to check for it.
“What have we got here?” asked Lombardo, coming out of the bedroom.
Gilbert looked at his young partner, deadpan, thinking he was going to get a hard time about it. “A glove,” he said.
“From where?”
“From the alley.”
“Are we desperate, then?” asked Lombardo, tilting his head to one side, hoisting that smile of his to his face.
“I don’t know,” said Gilbert. “You’re the one who hasn’t had a date in three months.”
Lombardo lifted his chin. “I’ve got my standards.”
“I know,” said Gilbert. “Anything in panty hose.”
“Speaking of panty hose, you should see what I found.”
Gilbert held up the glove. “Maybe the other glove?”
Lombardo shook his head. “There’s nothing sadder than a desperate detective.” He gave Gilbert an elaborate cuff on the shoulder. “Next you’ll be asking me for a witness.”
Gilbert raised his eyebrows, as if Lombardo were a lost cause. “Celibacy has made you mean, Joe,” he said.
“Believe me, it’s a habit I’m trying to break,” said Lombardo.
He followed Lombardo into the bedroom.
Lombardo walked over to the writing desk. “Look at these,” he said.
Lombardo lifted yet more photographs and handed them to Gilbert. Eight-by-ten color photographs of a woman. Most probably taken by the Pentax out on the table? Photographs of a young woman. A pretty woman. A woman he recognized. She lay on the futon in the living room wearing a Chinese silk cheongsam, nothing else—a white woman, blond, with strikingly intelligent eyes, a high forehead, and the pedigree cheekbones of someone with fortunate genes. The photographs enticed. The enthralling mix of feminine vulnerability and intellectual brilliance startled.
“Rosalyn Surrey?” said Gilbert, looking up.
Lombardo nodded, his eyes filled with admiration, his heart melting even as he shook his head at the complicating and potentially nettlesome discovery of these photographs.
“What a babe,” he said.
Surrey was a hardheaded ambitious city councillor, a woman whom a lot of people loved to hate. But in these photos she looked more like a geisha girl. Lombardo flipped to the next photograph: sitting, her knees up, the silk gown sliding away, revealing a shapely bit of thigh. Startling photographs, perplexing photographs, disconcerting images of a woman who was often characterized in the press as a hellcat and an unrelenting climber, a woman with a tongue as barbed as accordion wire and with mayoral aspirations as poisonous as machine politics could make them. Now looking like the Playmate-of-the-Month. With the roundest, greenest eyes Gilbert had ever seen. Damaging photographs. With lips as full and pink as a midsummer’s rose. Photographs that resonated with motive. With a smile so tender, so relinquishing, Gilbert now sensed yet another thread, woven from more dangerous emotions, and derived from much higher stakes. Photographs like these could easily ruin an ambitious city councillor’s career. Photographs like these could easily get a man like Edgar Lau into trouble.
Photographs like these were photographs to kill for.
The CSU finished their preliminary work.
“You want us to vacuum now?” asked Hutchison, a harried bald man with a circular wind-up tape measure on his belt. “Get a couple bags for the lab?”
Gilbert surveyed the scene one more time. He knew that sooner or later the technicians would have to vacuum, but once they did, the scene would be gone, forever disturbed, and the living breathing snapshot of Edgar’s murder would be obliterated. He heard an agonized wail from downstairs, Mrs. Lau clutched by her first frantic grief, the wail modulating into a tangle of muffled Cantonese words. Was there a father in Edgar’s life? He stared at Edgar. He couldn’t help thinking of the man on the yellow Honda in the bedroom photograph. Was that Edgar’s father? That man with the brown face and all the teeth?
“Not yet,” he said. “Go get a coffee. If you see the guys from the Coroner’s office, tell them to wait. Joe and me are going to pick this place
apart.”
They were going to pick this place apart because he knew that in this apartment there had to be a clue, a shred, some item that might later turn out to be of consequence, something he had to find before the crime scene was dismantled by the creep of time and the carelessness of well-meaning techs. He had a chance with this one. A real chance. This wasn’t some crack dealer shot in a back alley with no clues anywhere. This was inside. An interior. These rooms could yield a wealth of raw information.
The CSU techs left. Gilbert continued to stare at Edgar Lau. Murdered in his own dining room. But did Rosalyn Surrey have anything to do with it?
“How soon can we move him?” asked Lombardo. “I’m sure Mrs. Lau is upset with him here like this.”
Gilbert’s eyes narrowed. He hardened himself against Mrs. Lau’s grief.
“He stays like that until we’re through with him,” he said:
“Foster Sung wants to go,” said Lombardo.
Foster Sung puzzled Gilbert. The man owned millions in real estate, yet consorted with the Laus? Immigrant Chinese, presumably from Vietnam, who lived in impoverished and decrepit apartments downtown? “Get a statement from him,” he said. “Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow.”
“What about Mrs. Lau?”
He listened, could hear her weeping. “See if she has any friends she can stay with,” said Gilbert. Her weeping was upsetting him. “Get what you can out of her, but I don’t think she’s in any shape to talk.” He turned to Edgar, looked at Edgar’s belt buckle: crossed silver cobras with fake rubies for eyes, the silver smeared with blood. “We’ll give her a day or two before we have a real go at her.”
While Lombardo took statements from Foster Sung and May Lau, Gilbert went back to the living room, carefully sidestepping the blood. He looked at Edgar’s clip sitting on the dining room table. The clip was starting to bother him. Where was the gun? Would the gun remain unfound? He looked around the living room. The man had books on Chinese and Vietnamese history, possessed skill as a photographer, and practiced ink-and-brush Chinese calligraphy. Evidence of a cultivated man. A civilized man. But he also had a gun. Somewhere. Why did he own a gun? The question gnawed at Gilbert. To protect himself? Why did he have to protect himself? And from whom? The clip posed many questions. Was Edgar’s life in danger? Did that danger have anything to do with Metro Councillor Rosalyn Surrey? The clip was like a signpost to Gilbert, evidence that overwhelmingly suggested Edgar’s involvement in criminal activity, and, most likely, criminal activity within the ethnic framework of the Toronto Chinese. Was Edgar’s murder gang-related? Was this about tongs and triads, something that would complicate the murder a hundredfold? The ransacked apartment suggested Edgar had been hiding something. Had gang members come to find whatever he had been trying to hide? Or was this just a plain and simple robbery?
Gilbert looked around the apartment. No dust anywhere, not even in the accordion folds of the lampshade. A large set of panpipes hung on the wall. A brass elephant two feet tall stood next to the slashed futon. An impoverished apartment, not the best real estate in the city, but a neat apartment, and, despite the obvious ransacking, the apartment of a man who cared enough to keep it clean and organized.
But what of the ladder? Simply a tool for obtaining a higher camera angle, or a means of getting into the attic?
Gilbert got the ladder and carried it to the front hall. The spacing between the ladder’s feet matched exactly the spacing between the four scratch marks on the floor. He climbed. He pushed the access panel aside and pulled himself up into the attic, his nostrils flaring at the damp musty smell, his ears adjusting to the rattle of the rain against the roof. He got to his feet, clenching his jaw as the dull ache in his knees came back, and turned on his flashlight.
Pink insulation lay scattered between the joists. The rain susurrated, crescendoed, like a million tiny snare drums, a lulling but disorienting sound, driven by the wind into oscillating and chaotic phrases, a gray melody without a tune. Several planks had been laid over the joists to form a walkway, old planks splattered with old paint, tossed-away pieces, maybe scavenged in side streets, one with a decorative design of beer bottle caps hammered into it, another with rusty nails battered flat. As Gilbert shone his flashlight along this walkway he saw a rat scurry away into the gloom, gray fur matted with rain, pink tail covered with fine translucent hairs. He heard a drip somewhere, and, turning, saw a leak, the drops falling like diamonds past the beam of his flashlight, dripping at an angle from one of the roof joists.
Gilbert was a tall man, six feet three, had to stoop. The attic was chilly and damp, and his breath steamed over in the cold. A dismal place, as if he’d taken a wrong turn in somebody else’s nightmare.
He advanced three steps along the walkway and stopped. He heard pigeons cooing, the beating of wings, but, scanning the attic, couldn’t see them anywhere. Why was it so empty up here? No boxes of junk, no exercise bicycles, no cans of old paint, just an uninterrupted expanse of pink insulation, all of it sprinkled with old attic dust, like a big polluted rose-colored cloud.
He continued along the walkway, inspecting the insulation as he went. It looked undisturbed. He heard the pigeons cooing more loudly, swung his flashlight upward. Where could they be? Somewhere behind the roof planks? He smelled them in the overpowering damp, the gagging smell of dirty birds crowded together in their own excrement.
That roof plank up there looked new. He stopped, shone his flashlight at the plank. A new section of roofing plank, fixed with wing nuts, not nails.
How to get over there? The floor planks stopped just a few feet ahead. He pondered the unexpected obstacle. He would have to balance on the joists. One misstep and he might fall through the ceiling.
He tested the first joist with his left foot, then placed his right hand against the slope of the roof for support. He brought his right foot forward to the same joist and balanced, the cartilage inside his knees grinding uncomfortably. Once sure of his balance, he moved to the next joist, paused again, and so on, until he came to the wing-nut plank.
The plank was cut to size, no more than three feet long, flush with the contiguous planks, but white, fresh, unsullied by the last hundred years of dirt, dust, and mildew. As he unscrewed the first wing nut, he heard the kerfuffle of pigeons nearby. Placing his left hand against the plank to keep it in place, he unscrewed the remaining wing nut and removed the plank. The plank was heavier than expected, with something attached to the other side.
He turned the plank over and saw an old leather knapsack, scuffed and worn, the straps with silver buckles, a small knapsack, a child’s knapsack, with the faded crest of a boys’ private school—Victoria College in Hong Kong—pressed into the leather of the fold-down flap. The knapsack was screwed into the plank with half-inch screws. Gilbert held the plank under his right arm and negotiated his way back to the walkway. He lowered the plank to the walkway. He opened the leather knapsack and pulled out an IGA grocery bag. He untaped the grocery bag and withdrew its contents.
He instantly recognized the contents, still had an eye for such things, like riding a bicycle, or learning the Australian crawl. He never forgot, had a knee-jerk instinct for it, even though he hadn’t worked in Narcotics for seventeen years. What the Chinese gangs called a “piece”—three of them. Eight hundred grams each. Wrapped and sealed in heavy-duty clear plastic, fashioned into hard bricks, stamped with a few rough Chinese characters. Glowing like the first snow of Christmas. Like mother-of-pearl. Like ivory. Like the white of the whitest lily. Not brown, such as the Iranian gangs sold. Not the yellow of the Indian gangs. But white. China White. From the Golden Triangle, that mountainous jungle land where the opium poppies grew fat, where stems swelled with sticky goiters, where peasants scarred bulbs with special knives so they bled with the thick tarry gold that the jungle labs turned into heroin. Three “pieces,” twenty-four hundred grams in all, eighty percent pure. The most potent heroin anywhere. Estimated street value, once turned into caps for t
he average junkie, three-point-five million dollars.
He knelt beside Edgar, rolled up the dead man’s sleeves, checked for track marks, found none. Just bloodstains. He knew how destructive heroin could be, remembered several sad cases from his years in Narcotics. A mother so strung out she forgot to feed her baby and found the infant dead in its crib. A fire in a shooting gallery, the junkies too spaced out to escape. That tragic night when undercover officer Carolyn Yano had been gunned down while buying 150 caps from a Turkish street dealer. Edgar Lau wasn’t just another street dealer. He was a player. This man was a dangerous victim, and this murder was a dangerous murder, and Gilbert knew he might be looking for dangerous suspects, suspects who might possibly have a stake in the multimillion dollar stash of drugs on the table, a stash with such a dizzying value that even the most cautious trafficker would take a chance, would count any number of homicides simply as the cost of doing business.
He heard footsteps on the metal fire escape, saw the French doors open, reached for his gun, racked one into the chamber, and aimed. Lombardo. In his off-white London Fog trench coat, his hair roguishly tossed by the wind, his square jaw showing its usual late-in-the-day shadow of whiskers. Just Lombardo. Eyes glittering in the lamplight, uncertain, sensitive, accepting. Joe looked first at Gilbert, then at Gilbert’s gun, then raised his hands.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll pay my parking tickets.”
Gilbert holstered his gun, the weapon sliding snugly against his ribs with reassuring smoothness. “Sorry, Joe,” he said.
“Too much caffeine?” asked Lombardo.
Gilbert nodded toward the table. “Look what I found in the attic.”
Lombardo looked, grew still, eyed the bricks of product with quick comprehension, then turned to Gilbert. “Shit,” he said.
Gilbert stared at Lombardo. “No, Joe,” he said. “It’s heroin.”
The two detectives gazed at each other. Then smiled. Then laughed. Laughed the way shipmates on a sinking ship laugh, the way miners trapped in a cave-in laugh, laughed because they understood what the illegal narcotics on the desk meant to their investigation. It meant that the people they had to investigate might take lethal measures to stop them. It meant they couldn’t work this one alone, that they were going to have all kinds of interference; the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and not only the OPP and the Horsemen but also some of the American agencies; way too many pilots to steer the plane. Laughed to the point of tears because they were working a dozen murders already, and Christmas was two weeks away, and neither of them had done their Christmas shopping, and the rain was never going to stop. Laughed because they now had to watch their backs. Both men just wanted to go home and forget about the glove in the tree, about Playmate-of-the-Month Rosalyn Surrey, and the multimillion-dollar dose of China White on the desk. But at last their laughter died, and Gilbert felt empty, spent, like a junkie coming down, as if the joke hadn’t been worth it after all.