Keating wasn’t a man to waste money on inessentials. If it didn’t help acquit, to paraphrase, it certainly didn’t fit—not in Bobby’s domain. In the golden one’s estimation, a mere prodigal extravagance—like office furniture—said nothing to anyone who counted, not to juries or to judges, and as for his clients, the radiant counselor usually met them on their own turf in holding cells where furniture was sparse and nothing to brag about.
“A few years back, you represented a defendant of Chinese descent.”
“Many. Mainly drugs. Dealers are about the only defendants who can afford fifty-two weeks of good solid lawyering. Except for the affable brothers of Saint Anthony, of course. And rap stars. And snakeheads, the inestimable people smugglers, they’re really rich.” Again, the merry thunderclap, the cascade of cappuccino chins shivering with laughter, the luminous smile.
And the penny dropped for Flo. Snakeheads. Snakeskins. She was in the right place here. “That time it was murder one,” she said. “You bargained it down to manslaughter one.”
“That was Lee Ho Fook. Anyway, that’s the name he used here in this country. That’s the same name you’ll find in the records. He was an undocumented alien. He did some time, he paid his debt to American society.” Golden Bobby shrugged his eyebrows. “The victim was one of his own and Lee got deported. End of story. What do you want him for this time?”
Flo opened her briefcase and extracted a copy of the bar scene photograph. Excised: Special Agent John James Reilly and paralegal Marie Priester.
“This him?”
Golden Bobby glanced at the picture. “You don’t have files? Mug shots?”
“We do. We’re just looking for confirmation.”
“To what end?”
“The F train killings. The other people in that picture were two of the victims. Here’s the whole shot.”
“Whoa, now that’s something.” Counselor Keating examined the picture.
“Is he Lee Ho Fook?” Flo said.
“Could be. That’s not a great shot, it’s a little out of focus.”
“How did Lee Ho Fook, an undocumented immigrant, manage to pay your fees?”
Golden Bobby stood and started pacing the floor, his shoes squeaking on the rubber tiles. “Weeelll now…” And a deep, rough chuckling commenced, like the sound of a man trying to bring up phlegm. “That was such a looong time ago, Lieutenant Ott. And How Long is a Chinaman’s name, right?” Again, the thunderclap, but this jolly bolt enticed no more than a tight smile from Flo. “I don’t honestly remember the specifics, Lieutenant, but you know what Eric Hobsbawm said…”
Hobsbawm, Eric.
“Hobsbawm?”
“British professor, my philosophy and history tutor at Oxford when I was a Rhodes Scholar.”
Golden Bobby paused to let that one sink in, true or false. He stopped pacing and straddled a plastic chair. Under his great glittery mass, the chair seemed to vanish.
“Oxford,” said Flo. “That, counselor, sounds pretty impressive.”
“It was okay. Most of them were snobs there, bigots, heads halfway up their derrières. Otherwise, it was an all right place, not overly hard. I stayed two years, could’ve stayed three but got bored. They don’t exactly kill themselves with work at Oxford, which I suppose is good preparation for the lives most of them lead. Great talkers, glib, never shut up. Oxford is a wonderful place for precisely that, lots and lots of talk. Oxford is terrific for anything you’re going to do that involves jaw-jaw, as long as you’re not talking with people who wear their pants halfway down their butts, do dope, tote guns, travel in posses, and, instead of neckties, flaunt diamond-studded platinum crosses weighing a couple of pounds. But as I was saying about Eric.”
Eric…“Hobsbawm?”
“Right. I got along with Eric. Eric had a theory about the underclass and their natural leaders, how the established powers interpret acts by underclass leaders as crimes. And legislate accordingly.”
“Interesting. But what’s this got to do with Lee Ho Fook? And murder one.”
“Not to get too philosophical about it now, Lieutenant, but Mr. Lee was a natural-born leader. His undocumented people here are an underclass. And the underclass look after the leaders they look up to. Logical when you think about it. And by the way, Lieutenant, please don’t forget, manslaughter one, that’s what we pleaded and that’s what we got. And I didn’t probe the whys or wherefores of how his people got the money to pay Lee’s legal fees, but they did. Honest, hardworking people, the Chinese. I believe we owe them a lot. In fact, I know we owe them a billion dollars a week now, every week forever and ever, no amens, ever since Iraq and Afghanistan. Our best bankers, the Chinese. And I for one don’t ever want to argue with our Chinese bankers. No way, not me. Never know when they might seek my good counsel again.”
Leader of the underclass…“So how did Mr. Lee, working-class hero, get in the country? The first time, I mean.”
“Remember Riis Park?”
“The beach? Next to Breezy Point, I’m out there every summer.”
“Right. I’m talking about the night a leaky tin can freighter washed up in the surf there, turned over on its side and dumped a few hundred undocumented Chinese into freezing waters. Many of them drowned. Lee Ho Fook was one of them. But he didn’t drown. And he didn’t get caught. He was a strong swimmer, Lee.”
Flo recalled the event, a notorious slice of New York history that, over the years and not all that many years, congealed in the collective New York memory with a million other dark slices. “Yes,” she said, “I remember that incident. The survivors got picked up by the park police. I think it was midwinter, middle of the night. And no one else around.”
“Lee didn’t get picked up. He saved a few of the others in the water and he hid them way far out in the dunes. Until the next night. And then they walked with Lee leading them. Walked, Lieutenant. On a New York winter night, in thin, damp, sandy clothes. They walked across the Marine Parkway Bridge and all the way down Flatbush Avenue and over the Brooklyn Bridge right into Chinatown. Direct. No deviations, no detours. No wandering around Brooklyn to somewhere like Bensonhurst or winding their way up into Astoria in Queens. But straight to the heart of the gold mountain. You know, Lieutenant, the Chinese banks in Manhattan Chinatown take in more cash per day than all the other retail banks in the city, combined. Lee knew that. He knew where his future lay. He did his homework before he came to this country. And that’s determination. Like I said, a natural-born leader, Lee Ho Fook. No sidetracking him.”
“He killed someone, he did a number for a loan shark.”
“That’s one story. There were others. So many stories, Lieutenant Ott, from so many sides. All a question of interpretation. You have yours, they have theirs, I have mine. But in the end, it comes down to a jury and a judge. And the New York County district attorney. If Lee hadn’t been undocumented, I might have gotten him off one hundred percent scot-free innocent, clean as the driven snow. I’m not saying I’m a Johnnie Cochran, none of that ‘If my arguments rhyme, he can’t do time.’ No, Lieutenant, you won’t hear that from me. But we could’ve had all those charges dismissed, just like that, if he had a Green Card.” Golden Bobby snapped a pair of sausage-sized fingers. “Not gone to trial and forget about a jury. A Green Card–carrying hero, our Lee Ho Fook, a model immigrant, you get the picture. Too good to fail, too good to jail—if you’ll pardon my rhyme. But Lee wasn’t in that privileged class. Lee had no Green Card, only a forged Social Security card and a forged driver’s license. They’re fairly easy to counterfeit, maybe because they make them that way on purpose. Anyway, I told him, I said, ‘Lee, I can’t lie about all that. You are what you are, Lee. And I’m not going to get disbarred for you. I may not be one of your people, but I can still do more for you in our criminal courts than any of your own kind here.’ ”
“And what did he work at? Besides whack jobs.”
“The usual, to start out. Dishwasher, food prep, busboy, deliveryman,
waiter. Lee worked his way up the food chain, fast. And all over the place, Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, D.C. A job ends? Get another job. He had a debt to pay off to the snakeheads, the people who brought him in the country. You see, Lieutenant, the fact is they all have to live almost like slaves, plugging away until they pay off that big debt to the snakeheads. That’s what they call the people smugglers from China. Snakeheads. Coming up from Mexico they got another name, coyotes or something. Anywhere from thirty-five thousand to fifty thousand U.S. dollars a pop. That’s what Chinese snakeheads charge, and that’s a lot of green, if you’re making minimum wage or less. Living in tenement dormitories like prisoners and then on top of that they’re charging you rent for your crumby little cot.”
Snakeheads…skins, snakes …live almost like slaves…Flo was elated. “Okay, that’s how your client got started. An indentured slave to snakeheads. But he ended up doing something else.”
“Indentured, yes, that’s exactly it, Lieutenant. But Lee was a natural leader, too. Lee was supersmart and a fine-looking fellow to boot. An Asian stud, you might say. He picked up English fast, not like some of them. And he loved to use it, he loved to talk, he was loquacious, almost like one of our more garrulous brothers in the ’hood. Almost like me, if you will. He’d talk about anything: politics, women, sex, he loved to talk about sex, hookers in Manhattan versus hookers in Atlantic City, white women versus yellow women versus black women—‘Once you go black, you never go back.’—his words, Lieutenant, not mine. He could’ve been a rapper the way he could talk up a storm in English. He’d talk about food, different kinds of drinks, his family in China, science, outer space, the stock market, gambling. He loved to gamble, of course, many of them do, the Chinese. He talked about all different kinds of capital punishment—he liked every kind—and he said China used the death sentence for almost any serious crime you can think of in that country. He could go on for hours, Lee, about baseball, football, basketball, he loved sports, played soccer, did martial arts, he talked about everything, you name it. Everything, that is, except what he was doing on the side for his employers. There he stayed mum. So they made him a bartender. Great tips. He paid off his debt fast. He started buying up pieces of other people’s businesses, an investor. And soon he was paying off other people’s debts, too, for a fee of course.”
“In other words—”
“In other words, Lieutenant, he had a nose for finance is what I’m saying. A good head for numbers.”
“Sharking. Shylocking.”
“I didn’t call it that, Lieutenant.” Golden Bobby spread his hands, large leathery hands like catcher’s mitts, and he shook his head. “Another time, another place, and Lee might have been an investment banker or a bond trader at Goldman Sachs, one of those outfits. He had all the right instincts and all the brains you could ask for. Might as well have gone to Harvard B-School. He was no lowlife, unless you think bankers are lowlifes, and I know some people who do. But I don’t. He had no Green Card, and that’s what hung him up.” Golden Bobby shrugged. “You get the picture, Lieutenant? A natural-born leader, Lee Ho Fook. With a great set of brains. Could have been a Rhodes Scholar, different time, different place.”
“Tell me something, counselor, you represent a lot of murder one clients from Goldman Sachs?”
Thunderclap of laughter. “No, not lately, no giant vampire squids in my office.” Deep sigh. “Not on East Twelfth Street.”
4:30 P.M.
Flo sat at her office desk with Reilly’s notebook.
Snakeheads…skins…snakes…snakeheads …almost like slaves…and John James Reilly, immigration specialist, small-time Mister Fix-It for Chinese corporate clients of mandarin attorney, William Eng, Esq.
And Marie Priester, paralegal. Was she duped? An unfortunate pawn? A shill?
Or willfully implicated?
Outside of Reilly’s notebook, no firm sign of an ambassador so far, but Flo had little doubt about who that diplomatically immune Excellency might be. And that particular ambassador was a matter of national security, of this much she was certain.
…sixty, thirty, unknown ten…Here, Flo still drew a blank. She closed the notebook and stared up at the projected images of the dead.
Frank walked in. “His widow,” Frank said. “If you run some of that story by her, it might ring some bells.”
“I doubt if I can get anything more out of her, Frank. She’s tapped out.”
“At least we know what her husband was working on.”
“We do?”
“You said so. People smuggling. Trafficking.”
“Right, that’s my take, but the rest looks clear as mud.”
“It’s a helluva business, Flo, billions a year. This is heading big-time. No small-time punks when you start looking up the line.”
Flo gazed thoughtfully into the remains of her afternoon latte, but found no clarification there. She was reluctant—no, utterly unable—to return to the widow’s home, that Bay Ridge house of trauma where they spoke for hours pretending it was the whole truth and all the while knowing it wasn’t even half-real.
Frank said, “Talk to me, Flo, I’m no telepathist. We on the same page here?”
“Lee Ho Fook and murder one. Or manslaughter, if you prefer—”
“You’re reading my mind, keep going.”
“Manhattan homicide ran the investigation start to finish.”
“Far as I recall.”
“Then the file should be complete.”
“The summary ought to be in the database, the rest is all on paper. Must be over a thousand pages, Flo, when you think about it. That’s a ton of reading, it could take all night.”
“So what you’re saying—”
“What I’m saying is Marty hates winter. A jock like him and he hates snow and ice and all that wind out there. He would love being indoors tonight, guaranteed snug as a bug holed up in the archives. Nice and warm. Might get a little bored, but at least our jockster be cozy.”
“He can borrow Krish and the two of them can comb the haystack. Find a connection, if there is one.”
“And in all this, we’re looking for—”
“I don’t know precisely,” Flo said, “not at this point. A trail head, for starters. A trail that may open up and lead us to Lee Ho Fook somewhere in Chinatown again. Since no one has said that’s not him in the picture with Reilly and Priester, not even his former lawyer…”
5:40 P.M.
Detective Sergeant Marty Keane was warm and satisfied in the Manhattan archives.
He arranged into several piles the records of the almost eight-year-old investigation of the killing of Chan Han, a Chinatown building contractor, a specialist in converting old tenements into new condos, boutique premises, restaurants, bars.
Marty smiled. “This should keep us busy here a few hours, Krish.”
“Looks like it.” Intern Krish Krishnaswami didn’t sound overly enthused. He collected the archive files, the raw material from the original investigation, and carted a couple of mounds of yellowing documents to the table where Marty Keane set up a temporary office.
“You know the broad outline of the old case, Krish?”
“Lieutenant Ott said it was a loan shark killing, a punishment. And the defendant’s lawyer got it down to manslaughter one. There was really no trial, just a plea deal, so the court records at Foley Square don’t have much. Lots of people were interviewed by the police—the transcripts are all in these files—and assistant DAs got started on the case, but they stopped when the defendant offered his plea and the deal was worked out.”
“According to the database summary here,” Marty said, “and this draws no conclusions, Krish, only factual findings—Lee Ho Fook shot the guy in the back of the head, one round, and then he took off. The guy was on his knees, execution style. Fook said he only wanted to scare the poor son of a bitch, just get him to pay his debt. Apparently, Chan Han owed the sharks vig up the wazoo. And they didn’t want his crappy little business, all th
ey wanted was cash. Fook said he didn’t know the gun had a round in it and he had no intention of killing the guy. He only wanted it to go click and give the guy the shits. But instead it went bang. And his lawyer cut the deal for manslaughter one. Fook did some time, named nobody else, and got deported.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Well, the weapon was found, an unloaded gun, dropped not far away in the street, no prints. And Fook was nailed the same night. DNA analysis linked him to the body. No question. He beat the guy up a little with his fists and feet. He pulled a gun. Some people nearby were willing to talk when interviewed, but most were hopeless. Some of them were almost right there on the spot only a few yards away and then they couldn’t be found anywhere on earth. These names these people got, all these Chinese names, they start sounding the same. But we’ll work up a list, we’re looking for anyone connected—before or since—with smuggling illegals, ID forgery, financial felonies, killing of course, and probably also narcotics, why not? Your standard repertoire.”
“Who identified the body? Of the victim, Chan Han.”
“The police. That’s to say, the vice squad. He was well known there, back from when he was young and putting together the nut for his construction business. Chan Han started out a pimp, strictly in Chinatown. Part of the trafficking chain. Arrested only once, he was part of a big New Year’s pardon by an outgoing governor, they slipped Chan’s name in on the list right before Chan was supposed to start serving his six months. His people bought the pardon, you get right down to it. Nobody wanted the trafficking exposed and they were all worried Chan might blab. And then there was an amnesty on illegals, maybe fifteen years ago, and Chan Han applied and got his status regularized. A state senator went to bat for him then. Not an unconnected guy, this Chan Han, a very well-wired person. And after that Han turned legit, more or less. When he got killed, he had his papers in for citizenship. Over a dozen people must have heard that shot and yet nobody heard it, at least nobody willing to say so at first. He was killed in the storeroom of a Chinese grocery. It was closed for business, but the restaurant next door was open. A freezing winter like now, so the back door to the restaurant wouldn’t usually be wide open. But that night it was because there was a grease fire in the kitchen and they were airing out the place. They didn’t report it to the fire department, although they were supposed to, so you got reckless endangerment to the customers, who didn’t know from Shinola. Kitchen fire, shooting? They knew nothing. They’re all too busy scarfing up rice and dumplings, oblivious. Some of the workers were out behind the restaurant taking a smoke when the shot was fired. There were people living upstairs. There were two guys coming home to go upstairs and someone ran out of the grocery store. Lots of potential witnesses. But most of them saw and heard absolutely nothing. Or so they claimed. A lady upstairs called in to report the shot, but didn’t give her name. That’s what brought the police around to investigate. Never guess how they grabbed the shooter—squad car almost hit him, he was running against a light on Canal right out into traffic. The call was just going over the radio and they detained him, Lee Ho Fook. Bloody fists, bloody shoes. Chan Han’s blood. Here, Krish, start with the first folder. Get down all the names.”
F Train Page 14