by Scott Mackay
“I phoned Edgar because…because I wanted to make him understand…that he was wrecking our lives…”
Gilbert was disappointed. Here was a crucial watershed, a moment Surrey might have used to regain some of his dignity, to shake off all the booze and show some courage, but…he let it go, as if he didn’t recognize it as an opportunity. He blamed everything on Edgar.
“I talked to him,” continued Surrey. “And I…I said that I…that I still loved my wife. I remember ordering a couple of drinks, something to warm me up after walking all that way in the rain. Edgar stuck to tea.” He turned to Rosalyn. “I talked for a long time. I tried to get him to tell me that he wouldn’t go near you anymore.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you?” she said, her eyes now fretful.
“You think I’m a killer?”
“I don’t know what you are anymore. Garth.”
“I’m your husband,” he said weakly.
She had nothing to say to this. She looked at Gilbert. He negotiated his way carefully through the wreckage of their marriage. Husband. Rosalyn was dead to the word. He could see she just wanted to get on with it.
“Did you leave the restaurant together?” asked Gilbert.
“No,” said Surrey, rousing himself as if from a dream. “He left first. I stayed behind. I ordered another drink. I don’t know how long I sat there. But eventually I decided I had to go after him. I had to try again. So I paid up, went outside, and started walking east along College. The rain was really cold. I thought it might turn to snow. It woke me up a bit. I took a couple deep breaths to clear my head.”
“And you finally caught up to him?” asked Gilbert.
“No,” he said, his voice softer. He glanced at Rosalyn. It was painful to see how deep the fracture was. “I walked all the way over to his place on Spadina. I thought I might catch him before he actually went inside. But I didn’t. I had to knock. I tried the front door next to the restaurant first. I knocked and knocked but no one came to answer. So I went round back.” Surrey gripped the right lens of his round-rimmed glasses, centering them on his nose. “That’s when I saw the little guy run like crazy down the stairs.”
Gilbert waited. Outside, he heard the furtive rhythm of yet more rain. The little guy. The atmosphere of the room felt different, thicker, resonating with incipient revelation.
“What little guy?” asked Gilbert.
Rosalyn seemed to recede; if the living room had been a stage set, the lighting technician would have been steadily dimming her spotlight by hopeless and heartbreaking increments as a way to further isolate her from Surrey.
“I don’t know,” said Surrey, glancing at Rosalyn, as if he sensed her receding. “At first I thought it was Edgar.” His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his beard with the back of his hand. “But then I saw that he was actually smaller than Edgar. He froze me to the spot because he had a gun in his hand.”
Gilbert felt the atmosphere change again. He felt as if he had turned a corner in the case. Every so often a suspect turned into a witness. Every once in a while the pieces fell into place in the most unexpected ways.
“He had a gun?” said Gilbert. “How old did he look?”
“Young,” said Surrey. “In his twenties.”
“Was he carrying anything else?” asked Gilbert.
“Looked like a pair of gloves. Holding them in his other hand. He ran right past me and I thought for sure he was going to shoot me. But he ran right past me and went down the alley. I’ve never seen a little guy run so fast.”
“Did you see what color the gloves were?”
“No, it was too dark.”
“Can you remember what he was wearing?” asked Gilbert.
Surrey shrugged. “Black, I guess,” he said.
Gilbert pulled out his mug shot of Mok and showed it to Surrey. “Is this the man you saw?”
Surrey looked. “That’s him.”
“And which way did he run?”
“Out behind Gwartzman’s, toward Kensington Market.”
“And once he was gone what did you do?”
“I looked up the fire escape,” said Surrey, shrugging again, looking more helpless than ever. “I saw that the French doors were open. I thought I’d better go up. You know, make sure Edgar was all right. And I still wanted to…to talk to him. I thought if I could just find the right words…” He swallowed, shifted. “So I climbed the fire escape.” He looked at the big metal radiator on the far wall under the window, scared, unsure, as if he were a D-Day recruit about to step ashore in Normandy. “And that’s when I saw him lying there. On the dining room floor. Clutching this dish towel to his stomach. I got scared. He was shaking like crazy. He was having a convulsion of some kind. I know I should have gone in and helped him. But I just got scared, and I…” His eyes misted up. “The dish towel was soaked right through. It didn’t look like it was doing any good. I just…I just got out of there as fast as I could.” He turned to his wife. “I’m sorry, Rosie. But I…I let him die. I’m sorry I did that. I wished I could have saved him for you.”
Rosalyn’s hand went to her mouth, and her eyes moistened. God, this was awful. Gilbert felt he was in the middle of her grief, that he was drowning in her grief, and that he was swimming around in the shipwrecked pieces of their broken marriage. He hardened himself to it, pushed on.
“Was there anybody else in the room with him when you saw him?” he asked.
Surrey looked distractedly at his wife, extra solicitous, now that she was crying. “No,” he said.
“How long did you stand in the back lot before you climbed the fire escape?”
“Couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds after I saw the little guy run out.”
“What was the condition of the apartment when you looked inside?” asked Gilbert.
Surrey yanked his attention away from Rosalyn and peered at Gilbert, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Did anything looked disturbed, books taken down from the shelves and so forth?”
Surrey shook his head. “No,” he said. A knit came to his brow. “He had a stepladder in the middle of the floor. Other than that, the place was neat.”
“And you left?” asked Gilbert. “You left right away?”
“When I saw him lying on the floor like that…sure…I got scared. I wanted no part of it. The cook saw me coming down the stairs. That scared me even more. I thought I’d better disappear for a while. I thought the cook might think I was the one who shot Edgar. So I went down to our place in Florida. I thought if the police came asking, I could just say I was down there the night Edgar was murdered.”
Gilbert tried to piece it all together. Edgar gets home from the Portuguese restaurant around nine. Pearl visits at nine-thirty. Ten minutes later Foster Sung goes up and invites them to his table. They decline. Foster Sung goes back downstairs. Witnesses see Pearl leave at ten to ten. Shortly after, Surrey sees Mok race down the fire escape. Thirty seconds later, Surrey goes up, looks through the French doors, sees Edgar lying there with the dish towel already there, already pressed to his stomach, long before Foster Sung came up the second time to put it there. What was going on? Why would Foster Sung lie about the timing of the dish towel? They had Mok—the blood, the bullets, and now the eyewitness account. These were enough to convict. But with so many discrepancies like the dish towel remaining, Gilbert felt that maybe he hadn’t turned a corner in the case after all.
He left the Surreys in the rubble of their demolished marriage, feeling as if he were stranding them; neither of them was in any shape to be alone, and especially in no shape to be with the other. But what else could he do? He had to go home. So he ventured out into the rain. The rain was cold. He thought it might turn to snow. The sky was dark. Lives were wrecked. A victim was murdered. And a suspect was still on the loose. Jennifer despised him. His wife was bruised and beaten. Joe was under medical observation. Their murder remained unsolved. And he had no idea what he was going to do next. Another day, he thought. S
eventeen years as a homicide detective, twenty-seven as a cop. He shook his head. Was he ever going to get used to it?
Seventeen
On Monday, the ballistics test on the recovered Colt Diamondback .38-caliber revolver came back positive—the gun recovered from Mok’s room on Boulton Street was indeed the gun that had killed Edgar Lau. And Murphy was at least seventy percent sure the gun had been used in the Vancouver shooting as well.
The evidence against Mok was now overwhelming. Bullets used in both attacks were soft-nose wadcutters. The blood evidence found in Mok’s car was irrefutable. And now they had Garth Surrey and his eyewitness account. Any jury would convict with such evidence. He had to go after Mok.
Yet Gilbert remained equivocal. As he sat at his desk waiting for Frank Hukowich and Ross Paulsen to get there, he couldn’t help thinking about the dish towel again. And what about May Lau? How could she hear the workmen upstairs, but not the gunshot? Then there were the gloves—not worn, but carried by Mok. Running from the crime scene with gloves in his hand? No. There was something wrong with that picture. What bothered Gilbert most was the condition of the apartment, how the apartment had at first been neat, according to Garth Surrey, with no sign of slashed futons or unshelved books, but ransacked later, in and around the time the first officer had arrived. Was Donald Kennedy really part of the corrupt police ring at 52 Division? Had Donald Kennedy been responsible for the ransacking, looking for Edgar’s evidence against the police ring? Had Kennedy ripped the dish towel from Edgar’s wound, speeding his death as a way to keep him quiet? Maybe. Maybe not. He had no way of knowing. Which meant he could only operate on the established certainties. The blood, the bullets, and the eyewitness. Despite all the discrepancies—and Donald Kennedy’s possible involvement—the hard evidence demanded he arrest Mok.
When Hukowich and Paulsen finally came, Gilbert told them what they had on Mok. He stressed Mok’s connection to Foster Sung, as well as how Mok had been hired by the 14k to shoot Edgar in Vancouver last summer in the hope they would lend him some support. He wanted to tell them about Mok’s interesting blood phenotype test, and recount to them how he had gone up to Edgar’s apartment late at night to make comparisons between Mok’s mug shot and the photographs of Foster Sung and Ying Lau. But he knew both men would instantly discount this particular investigative hypothesis as groundless—the conniving speculation of a desperate detective who wanted to get their help any way he could.
“We have no idea where Mok might be, and it’s going to take a lot of manpower to find him,” he said. “We thought you could supplement our squad with some of your own resources. If we’re going to mount a dragnet for this kind of skilled and experienced criminal, we’ll need more officers.”
Both men stared at Gilbert for several seconds. Then Paulsen leaned forward. “From our standpoint, we believe our resources would be wasted mounting a dragnet for Tony Mok.” Paulsen shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Barry, but we can round up any number of petty thugs any time we want. Mok simply doesn’t fit the profile we’re after.”
“What about the six hundred caps of heroin we found in his room?” said Gilbert. “That’s got to mean something.”
Paulsen nodded. “I’m glad you got them off the street.”
Gilbert turned to Hukowich. “Frank?”
Hukowich looked straight ahead. “I’m sorry, Barry. I’m afraid it’s a no-go from our end as well. Mok’s just too small-time, with no real connections to anything worthwhile.”
“What about his connection to Foster Sung?” asked Gilbert, knowing if he didn’t get more manpower he would never find Tony Mok. “Foster Sung was Mok’s guardian way back when.”
“Barry,” said Tim Nowak, “I’ve had Benny Eng review Mok’s file. There’s no current evidence that links Mok to Sung in any criminal way. You and Joe are going to have to work this one yourself. We can send an updated lookout notice to patrol, but other than that, you’re on your own. We’ve got more pressing cases now.”
Lombardo returned after lunch and took the bad news solemnly. His dark Mediterranean eyes smoldered.
“You know what?” he finally said, looking ready to hit something. “We don’t need their help. We can do it ourselves. Paulsen bugs me. And I can hardly keep a straight face when I look at Hukowich’s hair.”
“Nowak came to me later,” said Gilbert. “After Hukowich and Paulsen had gone. He said we could work overtime on Edgar for another week. After that…” Gilbert raised his palms.
“So we work like hell for the next week,” said Lombardo.
“I’m going to talk to Peter Hope,” said Gilbert. “Let’s ask the Red Pole if he knows where we can find Tony Mok. If I tell him we’re going to ease up on Pearl, he might go for it.”
Lombardo’s eyes narrowed. “But I thought he lied to us about Pearl coming down the apartment stairs first on the night of the murder. Are we going to trust him?”
“One way or the other, we’ve got to talk to Tony,” he said. “If I tell Hope we’re going to eliminate Pearl as a suspect, he might help us.”
Lombardo nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But she’s still a suspect, no matter what.”
“Agreed. Hell, Foster Sung’s still a suspect. So’s Garth Surrey. So are Rosalyn and May. So’s Donald Kennedy. But when you look at everything we have, Tony Mok is our strongest suspect by far. It was his gun. It was his bullet. And it was Edgar’s blood in his car. We’ve got to go after him any way we can.”
Lombardo gave him a wry grin. “Even if we sleep with the enemy?”
Gilbert conceded the point. “Even if we sleep with the enemy,” he said.
Gilbert asked Lombardo about May Lau’s medical record. Lombardo had spent the morning tracking it down. “Did you get her doctor’s name?” asked Gilbert.
“A Dr. William Tse, on King Street.”
Gilbert raised his eyebrows. “So you got her chart?”
Lombardo frowned, looked away. “Tse has it in storage,” he said. “He keeps all his inactive charts in a warehouse behind the medical building. She hasn’t been to see him in a while.” Lombardo’s frown deepened. “May Lau’s was on a high shelf.” Lombardo looked away. “I couldn’t reach it.”
Gilbert stared at his partner.
“You couldn’t reach it?” he said, enjoying this. “Well…how high was it? Five feet?”
“Not funny.”
“Four?”
Lombardo again looked ready to hit something. “It had to be at least nine feet up.”
“And you couldn’t reach it?”
“They didn’t have anything to stand on.”
“No shoe boxes lying around?”
“Watch it.”
“Or a step stool?”
“What I lack in height I make up for in looks,” said Lombardo.
“So your mother tells you.”
“And Dr. Tse is six-one. He wasn’t there. He’s going to get it for us later. His secretary’s going to fax it to us. She couldn’t reach it either. She’s short too. So you see, I’m not alone. The short shall inherit the earth.”
As if on cue, the fax machine bleated, and, watching the number on the display, they saw that it was coming from Dr. Tse’s office. Both detectives watched as the machine began to hum.
“Was it a big chart?” asked Gilbert.
“Twenty pages.”
The fax machine finished a few minutes later and the two detectives went over to have a look.
They found a report of a general physical on May Lau dated July 24, 1993, years after the Vietcong artillery shell had supposedly damaged her hearing. Item number 4 was about hearing. Both ears were normal, with no deficit in either. The two detectives looked at each other. Gilbert knew they were both thinking the same thing. Why would May Lau lie about the circumstances surrounding her own son’s murder? Many incongruities complicated this case, but that was one of the most perplexing ones.
Gilbert sat in the Golden Bamboo Restaurant on Spadina and Cecil at a table n
ear the back sipping a Diet Coke. He found himself in the ambiguous position of having to treat Peter Hope, the 14K enforcer, not only as an adversary but as an ally. Chinese lanterns hung from bamboo poles overhead. He looked out the window where he saw the traffic going by on Spadina Avenue. Lots of it. A lot of garment places around here, so there were dozens of garment trucks going back and forth. His goal was simple. Find Tony Mok. He looked behind the counter where he saw the short-order cook serving up Chinese noodles, scooping quickly into the pot as if he were catching a fish, twirling the noodles with three quick turns of his wrist and sliding them in a neat knot into a bowl, a deft and skilled maneuver that took all of three seconds. Gilbert believed Tony Mok had disappeared into the impenetrable world of triads and tongs. If he was going to find him, he needed someone who knew the way. Who better than Peter Hope? What choice did he have? He wasn’t going to have the investigation stalled here, when they were so close to clearing it. He had to walk through the snake pit, careful of his ankles, and hope for the best.
A black Mercedes with tinted windows pulled up in front of the Golden Bamboo. Gilbert expected the aging and diminutive Red Pole to emerge from the rear door. But a much younger Chinese man dressed in a plain brown suit, wearing a black chauffeur’s hat, a black tie, and black leather driving gloves, got out of the driver’s side. He walked around the front of the car and entered the restaurant, where he stood at the WAIT-TO-BE-SEATED sign and scanned the tables. When he finally saw Gilbert, he moved through the restaurant, ignoring the solicitations of the maître d’, and came to Gilbert’s table.
“Mr. Hope is waiting in his car,” he said.
Gilbert stared at the young man, then placed a few dollars on the table and followed him out to the car.
The chauffeur opened the back door of the Mercedes for Gilbert. Gilbert got in and found the Red Pole waiting for him. Hope wore a navy-blue overcoat, gray flannels, a white shirt, and a red silk scarf. He looked fragile today, his skin nearly transparent, his rakish hair looking more like an old woman’s than an old warrior’s. The two men stared at each other. The Red Pole finally gave Gilbert a small bow.