Fall Guy

by Scott Mackay

  Gilbert shook his head, wondering how long he could keep Edgar Lau’s murder away from the press.

  “Anything else on Foster?”

  “He was stabbed by an unknown assailant seven years ago while walking to his car in an underground parking lot late at night.”

  “Really?”

  “Telford found the original assault report on our database using that new search program. Sung nearly died. He managed to drag himself to the attendant’s booth and the attendant called an ambulance. The ambulance took him to Mount Joseph, where they gave him an emergency O-positive blood transfusion, but something went wrong with the transfusion, his body had a delayed transfusion reaction a couple days later, and before they could give him another transfusion they had to have their blood bank run a battery of matching tests. He almost died waiting for the results, but they finally found him some blood he could use.”

  “Did they ever find his assailant?”

  “No.”

  “Did Telford dig up anything on our other suspects?” asked Gilbert. “What about Mrs. Lau?” he asked.

  “She came up clean,” said Lombardo. “Not even a parking ticket.”

  “What about Pearl?”

  “She has a gun charge.”

  “A gun charge?” he said. “Maybe the revenge angle works after all. Tell me about the gun charge.”

  “A two-shot Derringer fell out of her purse at a dance club. The bouncer saw it and called the police. A Derringer. Can you believe it? They stopped manufacturing those things in 1935, so she must have had it custom-made. And she must have her loads custom-made too.”

  “Why?” asked Gilbert. “What’s it take?”

  “A forty-one-caliber.”

  “Forty-one-caliber?”

  “She was acquitted. She’s rich. Her lawyers argued successfully that the gun didn’t belong to her, and that the bouncer was wrong about it falling out of her purse. The bouncer didn’t show up to testify.” Lombardo shook his head. “I’m sure he was threatened.”

  Gilbert considered everything Lombardo had told him. Connections. He knew they had to be there, but he had no idea how they joined up yet. The name Bing Wu was indeed familiar. And what about Pearl Wu? He now wanted to see Pearl Wu. Beautiful but scarred. Was it a crime of passion? He tried to reconstruct it. Pearl Wu goes up to Edgar’s apartment and shoots him to avenge herself. But does she then search the apartment for the heroin? For the key in the yellow balloon? For something that incriminates her in another crime?

  He opened the door of the Lumina. “Let’s talk to the cook,” he said.

  Gilbert and Lombardo hurried through the rain to the Champion Gardens Chinese Restaurant. A door next to the restaurant led to the upper apartments—Mrs. Lau’s on the second floor, and Edgar’s on the third. Gilbert glanced at the dirty plate-glass windows of the restaurant: dusty snake plants thrust upward in a profusion of bladelike points from a long narrow planter attached to the low-slung sill. He pushed his way into the restaurant.

  The restaurant had red carpeting, red wallpaper, red velveteen chairs, and tables with white tablecloths. Bamboo lanterns, lit with candles, glowed here and there. Decorative pagoda-style roofs hung over some of the tables at the back. Small Chinese gongs dangled from hooks overhead. The lights were dim and the air smelled of shark soup and chop suey. A bar stood to the left. A Coors Light sign in red and blue neon tubing hung above the bar.

  A waiter in a white shirt and black bow tie approached the detectives and asked them if they wanted a table.

  “No,” said Gilbert. “We’re here to see Dock Wen. We understand he comes on duty at one o’clock.”

  The man’s welcoming smile faded. “Wait right here,” he said.

  The waiter walked to the kitchen, looking put out by the task of fetching the cook.

  “Is he the waiter you talked to last night?” asked Gilbert.

  “No,” said Lombardo. “He’s a different one.”

  “And the one you talked to last night had no idea who was sitting at Foster Sung’s table?”

  “No.”

  “But saw Pearl Wu.”

  “Yes.”

  Gilbert bent his right knee a few times, easing the stiffness. “I don’t think your waiter’s giving it to us straight,” he said.

  Lombardo glanced around at the scattered patrons. “Neither do I,” he said.

  The waiter came back, stopped halfway up the aisle, and beckoned. “You come,” he said. “He see you now.”

  Gilbert and Lombardo followed the waiter through the tables.

  As they reached the back, Dock Wen emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands on a white dish towel. He was a thin man of forty, tall for a Chinese, with a narrow face which tapered to a small chin. His eyes possessed little of the usual epicanthic folds, were round, dark, and bulged from the general flatness of his face. He gazed at the detectives with marked suspicion, not something Gilbert liked to see in a potential witness.

  Gilbert showed his shield and ID. Joe did the same. The three men sat under one of the pagoda-like overhangs. Wen immediately lit a cigarette with a brown Bic throwaway lighter.

  “We’re just following up on the statement you gave Officer Kennedy last night,” said Gilbert.

  The cook took a ravenous pull on his cigarette, wolfing a solid block of smoke into his lungs. “Sure, go ahead,” he said.

  “You saw a man last night,” said Gilbert.

  “That’s right,” said Wen.

  “Out back,” said Gilbert.

  “A big man,” said Wen. “A big, big man.”

  “And he was Chinese.”

  Wen cocked his head to one side, glanced at Lombardo, then at Gilbert, looking confused. “He wasn’t Chinese,” he said. “He was a white man, like you. Very, very big.”

  Gilbert paused to think through this discrepancy in the facts. “Didn’t you tell Officer Kennedy the man you saw was Chinese?” he said. He opened the case folder and found the appropriate report. “That’s what we have right here, in your statement.”

  But Wen was emphatic. “No,” he said. “He was a big white man. Not Chinese.”

  Was Wen changing his story then? Or had Officer Kennedy made an error in taking the statement? Gilbert decided to move on.

  “Okay,” he said. “Forget the man out back. Did you see Foster Sung last night?” he asked. “He was sitting at a table right up there.”

  “Foster Sung?” said Wen, looking up at the ceiling, his eyes narrowing. “Foster Sung? Who’s Foster Sung?”

  “Did you see him?” persisted Gilbert. “Out in the restaurant.”

  “I didn’t go out in the restaurant,” he said. “You have a job like mine, you don’t go out in the restaurant. Busy, busy, busy. All the time, busy. Work, work, work.”

  “You didn’t go out in the restaurant,” said Lombardo, “but you went outside to have a smoke. It says right here: ‘Witness went to back stoop for a cigarette.’”

  “One cigarette,” said Wen, holding up his chicken-claw of a finger. “I smoke one cigarette. I see a man. A big man. He sees me and he runs away.”

  “And this was around ten o’clock?” asked Gilbert.

  “Ten o’clock,” confirmed Wen.

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  Wen nodded. “He had brown hair down to his shoulders. And a beard all over his face. And glasses. Tiny, round glasses. He ran away when I came out. Run, run, run. Like he was scared. He wasn’t Chinese. I saw no Chinese man out there. Just a big white man.”

  Five

  Once the detectives were through with Wen, they separated. Gilbert left by the front door. Lombardo went out the rear door, planned to drive by One Park Lane again to see if Pearl Wu had returned.

  Gilbert ran through the rain to his Lumina, got in, and sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes, thinking. He wasn’t convinced by Dock Wen’s story. Underneath the cook’s veneer of cooperation, Gilbert sensed a snow job. In addition, he thought Wen was scared, that he h
ad been forced to change his story. Officer Kennedy’s report unequivocally described a Chinese. Now Wen was telling them a white man. Was that a lie? He glanced at the curb where he saw a dozen warped pool cues tied in a bundle beside a garbage can painted with crude flowers. When Gilbert thought of the details, he found he couldn’t be sure: the long brown hair, the beard, the tiny round glasses. And maybe wearing beige Isotoner gloves, he thought ruefully? Details like that mitigated the possibility of a lie. Edgar’s killer might, after all, be white, male, and large. Which nonetheless still left the discrepancy in Officer Kennedy’s report about the Chinese man.

  He looked at the door leading to the upstairs apartments, one of the few improvements on the otherwise late-Victorian facade. A steel door, no windows, double locks, now with a big police sticker on it telling any and all that the place was a crime scene. He looked up at the second-floor window. May Lau’s apartment. He felt sorry for her, to lose a son like that. He thought of his own children, Jennifer and Nina, realized how much he missed Jennifer, now that she’d gone away to university. He wanted to wrap his arms around Jennifer and give her the biggest hug in the world. To get a better idea of how Mrs. Lau might feel, he imagined Jennifer dead, pictured Jennifer lying on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, with her own streak of blue dye through her hair, turning colder, motionless in the unnerving stillness of death, not sleeping, not resting, but eternally dead, never able to respond, talk, or breathe again. Echoes of grief filled his mind. He magnified those echoes. He felt suddenly heavy. Grief was crushing, as much in a physical way as an emotional one. He wondered whether May Lau was still staying with friends or if she had come back that morning.

  Just as Joe had taken a look at the back alley in broad daylight, so Gilbert now thought he should take a look at Edgar Lau’s apartment in the bleak light of this December afternoon.

  He got out of his car, walked to the steel door, and, using the extra keys, let himself in. Cheap indoor-outdoor carpeting, smelling faintly of cat urine, covered the steps. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened. Over the sound of the rain he heard music. Chinese music. Someone played an instrument upstairs. A Chinese instrument. An instrument that sounded like a violin, only thinner, reedier, softer. Five notes to the scale, like the black notes on a piano—a pentatonic scale—mournful, ghostly, a parade of phrases and cadences that drifted down the steep stairwell like a lament, creeping into his skin the same way the damp did. So. She was home. And she was upstairs. Playing a Chinese instrument. Playing a song to her dead son, an accompaniment to the rain, a melody meant to ease her own suffering.

  He climbed the stairs quietly. The steps slanted to the left, a sagging old staircase going more out of true every year. He didn’t want to disturb her. He tried to shut the music out because it made him feel sorry for Edgar Lau. He didn’t want to feel sorry for Edgar Lau. He had to remember what Edgar Lau had done to Pearl Wu—the stroke of a blade across her face, robbing her of the most precious thing she possessed. Feeling sorry for Edgar Lau would make him lose his impartiality. But the melody was like morning mist in a field, music he had to walk through, a song he couldn’t avoid. He stopped on May Lau’s landing and looked at her door. Steel, beige paint chipped away in spots, the dry remains of a dead fly flattened in the upper left-hand corner. A thick steel door. No wonder she hadn’t heard the shot. At least not through this door. But what about through the floor? Her not hearing the shot bothered him. She still had at least one good ear. And the floors were thin. He had heard her wailing for her son through the floor. He continued upstairs. Why hadn’t she heard the shot?

  He stuck the brass key in the lock and opened Edgar Lau’s apartment door. The sound of the rain immediately got louder, like rounding a bend on a quiet river and hearing rapids up ahead. He stepped into Edgar Lau’s apartment and listened to it drum off the roof. Then he heard water dripping into a pail in the kitchen. He took a few steps into the apartment and saw rain leaking through the ceiling, the plaster ripped away, drops plummeting from one of the exposed joists into a half-filled plastic basket. Gilbert couldn’t understand it. The man had a huge dose of China White worth millions of dollars in his attic and he had to live in a place like this? With pigeons and rats, and rain leaking through? With cheap carpeting on the outside stairs? And the smell of chop suey drifting up from below?

  He looked at the blood. Flies, even in December, grazed on the thicker purple spots. He moved into the living room and took a look at some of the books on the shelf. No More Vietnams, by Richard M. Nixon. West to Cambodia, by S. L. A. Marshall. The Fall of Saigon, by Peter S. Bradley. A History of China Since the Revolution, by John C. Lai. Hong Kong: Dream and Paradox, by Roland Percival. Weighty, analytical volumes. He couldn’t help thinking that Edgar had been seeking an answer in these books but had never succeeded in finding one.

  Gilbert moved to the table, lifted the photograph album, and found the snapshots taken on the boat. Here was one that showed a view looking downward, directly over the side of the boat. Water snakes and flying tunny schooled alongside. He turned the page. And stopped. Stopped and stared at the photograph on the right-hand leaf. Stared at Foster Sung. A much younger Foster Sung. Sung had a kerchief tied around his head to protect it from the sun. He had a nickel-plated semiautomatic stuck in the waistband of his tattered salt-stained shorts, the bright nickel plate shining with starlike intensity in the unrelenting sun, a show piece as much as a weapon, the gun of a man who liked to kill in style. In the background Gilbert saw people passing buckets, basins, even pots and pans from the hold up to the deck and over the side in a human chain, bailing the ship.

  He turned another page. And stopped again. This time because he saw a picture of that other man. From the photograph in Edgar’s bedroom. The man who drove the yellow Honda. In this picture the man had his shirt off. His muscles were as sharply defined as Edgar’s. Gilbert looked at the man’s face. A handsome face. Like Edgar’s. The resemblance was now readily apparent. The man held up a large fish by the gills, one that looked like a giant seagoing catfish, with whiskers around its nose, its pale eyes glistening in the sun. The man smiled at the camera with those big white teeth of his. A woman stood beside the man. May Lau. Much younger. But undoubtedly Edgar’s mother. Wearing a light summer dress with girlish puff sleeves and a lace collar, a dress with as many wrinkles as an old lady’s face, and as stained and dirty as a vagrant’s only pants.

  Then he realized that someone was looking at him. His peripheral vision sketched in a figure to the left. He turned.

  May Lau stood there, having entered the apartment silently. They stared at each other. Neither said a word. The silence lengthened between them. May Lau finally spoke. She looked at the photograph.

  “That’s my husband,” she said. “Ying. Edgar’s father.” The smile that came to her face was both fragile and melancholy. “The last picture we have of him.”

  She was a diminutive Chinese woman, in her late fifties, still handsome enough, but not beautiful the way she was in this picture on the boat. She wore a man’s shirt. Over the shirt she wore a crocheted vest of olive-green cotton yarn. She wore black slacks and Mao slippers, had her long gray hair pinned up behind her head in a cheap plastic comb. She wore large square glasses.

  “Mrs. Lau…” he said. “Mrs. Lau…I’m sorry about Edgar.”

  She nodded, accepting his condolences.

  “I don’t want you to think badly of Edgar,” she said.

  “Why would I think badly of him?” he asked.

  Her eyes now glistened. “Because he’s been in trouble with the police before,” she said. “Because he’s done some things he’s regretted.”

  Gilbert raised his eyebrows, squeezed his lips together. He wondered how extensive Mrs. Lau’s knowledge of her son’s activities might be. He thought of Pearl Wu’s slashed face again. He wanted to comfort May Lau. Children might grow up, become adults, but they never stopped being their parents’ children. He was a father. He understoo
d that.

  “He’s had some rough spots in his life,” he offered, glancing down at the photograph album.

  She nodded, acknowledging the photographs, and took a few more steps into the room. “That wasn’t easy for us,” she said. “We were desperate. We never wanted to leave but we had no choice.” She glanced at some of the other photographs. “Ying had a business. Not a particularly thriving one, but he was proud of it. He was a mechanic. The Communist government took that away from us. We had no choice. We had to go.”

  Joe was right. The woman spoke English well. Her voice was soft, reminded Gilbert of the pure tones of a crystal glass being struck by a spoon. He flipped back.

  “I see a picture of Foster Sung here,” he said.

  He watched her face. It changed. A darkness filled it, an intimation of a by no means placid emotion.

  “Foster is a family friend,” she said, her voice now devoid of inflection. “He’s been much too generous to us. We owe Foster our lives. The boat in these pictures belonged to Foster. Foster lent my husband money whenever we needed it. Foster’s always been much too generous to us.”

  Gilbert didn’t know what to make of this. Her voice wasn’t pure-sounding anymore. The crystal glass in her voice didn’t ring.

  “How did your husband die?” he asked.

  She took a weak breath, faltering in the face of his question, her lips slackening, her eyes seeming to recede into some deep hidden spot inside herself. “The boat sprang a leak,” she said, her voice straining, as if she had only the most tenuous hold on this fact. “He had to spend long hours bailing.” She looked down at the floor, at the flies grazing on her son’s blood. “He worked himself to death so everybody else could live.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Inadequate words, but could words ever be adequate in a situation like that?