by Tom Fowler
I shook my head. “I think Sam should be next. Something makes me think Sal will be a harder sell.”
“You want me to help?”
“Only if I really need it. Keep an eye on Alice. I’ll worry about the Chinese midget.”
“Try not to get waylaid again,” said Rich.
“Everyone’s a critic,” I said.
Chapter 19
When I got home, I realized I knew nothing about Sam, not even his real name. Vinnie only called him Sam because Vinnie was a jackass. How could I find someone whose name I hadn’t a clue and didn’t know much else about? I knew he worked for Vinnie, and that could be enough. They would have to talk. I could run Vinnie’s phone records, see who his frequent calls to and from were, and run those numbers to see who owned them. There didn’t appear to be another way to find Sam.
Tracing him could wait for tomorrow. Even with my nap earlier, I felt tired. I had brushed my teeth and changed into my silk pajamas when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number except to note it was the same caller who rang while I had been held prisoner. Might as well answer it. “Hello?”
“C.T.?” said a female voice I thought familiar.
“The one and only. Who’s this?”
“It’s Gloria. Gloria Reading.”
“Of course. How are you?”
“I called you last night but didn’t get an answer.”
“Yeah, I was tied up.”
“Busy with the case?” she said.
“Well, yes. And literally tied up.” I told her what happened, leaving out the part where I got waylaid by Sam. Gloria didn’t need to know all my secrets.
“Wow, you must have been terrified.”
“I’m not too proud to admit I was scared,” I said. “But I got free, and I’m still working on the case. It takes more than a zip tie to keep me down.”
“Your job is certainly interesting.”
“More than I thought it would be.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“I’m OK,” I said. “My headache is pretty much gone.”
We made small talk for a few more minutes. Then Gloria said, “I like you, C.T. You get me. Not many people do.”
“Chalk it up to my impressive people skills,” I said.
She chuckled. “I’m not looking for anything serious right now.”
I wondered where this conversation was headed. “Neither am I.”
“But if you want to have a good time here and there, I think we can work something out.”
Now knowing the direction of the conversation, I liked it. “I definitely think we can,” I said.
The next morning, I showered and shaved, then went downstairs to do some work. It was already past ten. I had Vinnie’s cell phone number from my inquiries into the Fishers, so I went online, found his provider, and broke into his phone records. I downloaded the last three months, dumped the data into a spreadsheet, and perused everything while I ate a bowl of cereal. The glamorous life of a private investigator. Next time, I might live on the edge and add a sliced banana.
Several numbers showed up frequently. I highlighted all multiples, filtered out the random one-offs, and then looked up the important numbers. One belonged to Margaret Madison, two to people whose names I didn’t recognize, and one belonged to Chaoxiang Ngai. Unless Vinnie had acquired a spate of friends with Chinese names, it had to be the man he referred to as Sam.
I ran Chaoxiang Ngai and got his address. It didn’t look right to me. When I plugged the address into a map program, I got the American Visionary Art Museum. Sam—I’d already fallen into the habit of thinking of him by his asshole-bequeathed nickname—had a fake address. I would need another way to find him. Vinnie’s house would work.
Vinnie bought a house in Rodgers Forge while we were still in college. It gave him an easy commute to Loyola—until he got kicked out, of course—and provided a nice private place to run his gambling enterprise. Vinnie’s parents had some money, but he paid for the house with the proceeds from his bookmaking business. I parked on his street about four houses up on the other side of the road. I had no idea what Sam drove, but a short Chinese man walking into and out of the house would be easy enough to spot.
Shortly after twelve-thirty, Vinnie left. He had to be taking his usual lunch at Donna’s. I grabbed some lunch at Pei Wei and returned to my surveillance spot. While I waited for Vinnie to return, Rich called. “How goes the case?” he said.
“I’m looking into Vinnie’s shortest henchman,” I said.
“Find him yet?”
“He has a fake address, so I’m staking out Vinnie’s house in the hopes he shows up here. How’s Alice?”
“She’s OK. I took her out for a while this morning. She really needed to be somewhere other than her hotel room.”
I didn’t like the risk involved, but I trusted Rich. I knew he could spot someone snooping on him, and trusted he would keep Alice safe. “Where did you take her?”
“White Marsh Mall. She was out of clean clothes, so she walked around and found some sales. Then we had lunch in the food court and walked around outside. I dropped her off before I called you. She looked a lot happier for getting out in the sun and doing something in fresh air.”
“Good. I know she was going stir crazy in there.” I saw Vinnie’s Mercedes come down the street and pull into his driveway. A small import followed it and parked at the curb. “Looks like Vinnie is home.” Sam got out of the import. “So is his Chinese friend. I’m going to follow him when he leaves.”
“All right. Good luck.”
Why would I need good luck following someone? “Thanks.”
About a half-hour later, Sam left. He drove the other direction down Vinnie’s street. I let him get past me, turned around in a driveway, and set off behind him. He had a lead of several houses on me. Sam left Rodgers Forge, got back onto I-83, and headed downtown. I stayed with him on 83. Early afternoon traffic allowed me to linger a few cars behind, even in the next lane, and still keep his car in sight. Watching all those cop shows paid off. Sam took 83 all the way to its terminus, where it became President Street, turned onto Fleet Steet, and headed into Fells Point.
He drove around the area, eventually parking on a dinky side street and walking into a bar. I couldn’t risk following him in there because he would recognize me, which left me to wait outside. In my car. In the cold. The high temperature today was set to be a robust 37. I could run the car and the heat periodically but ran the risk of arousing suspicion.
Most people paid for their lunches and bar tabs with credit cards. The problem people like me had with modern credit card machines was they only spit out the last four numbers. I wanted Sam’s whole card number. Getting it would lead me to his real address. I took my special tablet—loaded with a suite of hacker scripts and tools—out of the glove compartment and fired it up. I scanned for local networks and found the bar’s wi-fi. They still used WEP for alleged security. I cracked their WEP key in a couple minutes and got onto their network.
The credit card machine must be tied to a computer, which would use the network. Like most small businesses, the bar used the modem given to them by their service provider to function as a router as well as a bridge to connect the wired and wireless networks. I zeroed in on the router and took it down with a simple yet persistent denial-of-service attack. They would try rebooting the router. It wouldn’t help. I got out of my car and walked into a bar across the street so I could keep an eye on Sam.
An hour later, he got into his car. I put down my soda, walked to the bar he patronized, and went inside. The décor made the bar look more like a tacky American restaurant from my youth. Lamps with square shades sat in the middle of every table. I noticed two tables still needing to be cleared of empty glasses and debris. The bar itself was made of dark wood designed to look like mahogany. Closer inspection revealed it to be a stain job faded and chipped in splotches. Posters for hair metal bands hung on the walls. Four men and one woman sat
at a bar large enough to accommodate a crowd three times their number. I waved the bartender to me.
“What can I get you?” he said. He had a crew cut and a short black moustache. His voice sounded friendly enough, but his small smile never reached his eyes.
“Information,” I said. I showed him my ID.
“Not on the menu.”
“Neither is modern atmosphere by the looks of things.”
“Sorry we don’t meet your high standards. You drinking anything? Maybe some top-shelf liquor?”
“Sure. I’ll take a shot of Patron and a chaser of information.” I took a fifty out of my wallet and put it on the bar. “You can keep the change.”
“I think my memory is improving.” He took out a clean shot glass, pulled down the bottle of Patron, and poured me a shot. He set the glass in front of me. “What do you want to know?” he asked, pocketing the fifty.
“A few minutes ago, a Chinese midget left this place. Did he pay by credit card?”
“I don’t think he’s a midget. He’s just short.”
“I’m doing the bribing; I’ll do the stereotyping, too,” I said.
“Have it your way, man,” he said, raising his hands. “I’m only trying to keep the oppression down.”
“Your social consciousness is noted. Now, can you tell me if this Asian man of small stature paid with a credit card?”
“He did.”
“May I see the receipt?”
“You gonna drink your tequila?”
“Consider it rent for the barstool. The receipt?”
“Sure.” The bartender turned around and looked through a small pile of slips near the cash register. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Our network is down, and we had to dig up this old machine.” He looked at the receipt. “Huh. Jerk didn’t put his address on there.” He slid the receipt across the bar to me. While it didn’t have the address, it listed all of the credit card numbers instead of only the last four. I recorded the digits into a note on my phone. Sam couldn’t get his credit card bills at a fake address.
“Thanks,” I said, pushing the receipt back across the bar.
“You gonna drink or not?”
I pushed the glass across the bar toward him, too. “You can have it. Bottoms up and all that.”
The bartender downed the shot as I walked out the door.
Tracking the address attached to Sam’s credit card proved easy. Sam lived on a side street in Fells Point about four blocks from my building. At least assaulting me had been convenient for him. I wondered how many times Sam had observed me before whacking me over the head. I also wondered how long it would take me to stop thinking of him as Sam.
Vinnie called Chaoxiang Ngai “Sam” as some sort of pejorative. He had to hate it. While he may have been a small Asian man, Chaoxiang must have bristled at being reminded of it by someone like Vinnie. I hoped to exploit the probability; I only hoped I could do it before he shot me. I drove up Sam’s street, went a few doors past his house to find a parking spot, and turned off the engine.
Walking directly to the door and knocking struck me as a poor idea. Waiting would be similarly poor; I didn’t want to spend another cold day on a stakeout for who knew how long? This time, I didn’t even have any coffee or snacks. While I pondered my next move, Chaoxiang walked out of the house with a smallish dog on a leash. The petite pooch was tan with pointed ears, a classic long snout, and a long, curled-up tail. If I cared about dog breeds, I might have been able to identify it.
I slid down in my seat, but Chaoxiang walked in the opposite direction of my car. Once he had gone about 100 yards, I got out of the Lexus and closed the door quietly. I flattened myself against the other parked cars in case Chaoxiang turned back. He went around a corner, and I walked to his front door. Fells Point rowhousees offered few places to lie in wait for someone. I didn’t want to linger on the front steps, so I tried the door. Chaoxiang left it unlocked. I went inside, took out my .45, and sat in a chair in the living room.
Chaoxiang’s front room fit the definition of Spartan very well. He had a 40-inch TV mounted on the wall and a small entertainment center used for DVD and Blu-Ray storage beneath it. I sat in the only chair; a matching brown sofa sat at a right angle to it. A coffee table atop an ugly—though authentic—Chinese area rug rounded out the furnishings. The hardwood needed some work. My chair faced the side of the house, allowing me to watch both front and back.
I heard rustling from the front. I turned in the chair to face it. The door didn’t open. Did Chaoxiang know I sat in his living room? The blinds were drawn, so he couldn’t see in. What had the rustling been? It sounded like someone walked on the grass. I heard a dog bark. Then I heard footsteps on the hardwood behind me. By the time I turned, I saw Chaoxiang, without his dog, pointing a gun at my head.
Chapter 20
Chaoxiang stared down the barrel of his gun at me. I hadn’t turned all the way to face him, but I had a heck of a shot at the wall of the house. I knew if I completed the turn, I would be dead. How had Chaoxiang managed to sneak around the house and get behind me? He didn’t blink as he kept staring at me.
“Would you like to buy a vacuum cleaner?” I said to break the tension. I hoped my voice didn’t betray my nerves. My heart pounded in my chest. Flashbacks to the Chinese prison swam before my eyes. I fought them down.
“No,” he said.
“Some encyclopedias?”
“No.”
“How did you know I was in your house?”
“I happened to look back as you walked in. Saw your coat trail behind you. I tied the dog in the front yard and came around.” Chaoxiang’s English had an accent, but I understood him easily. He must have lived in the States for years.
“You’re stealthy,” I said. “You keep sneaking up on me.”
He shrugged and managed to keep the gun pointed at my head while he did. “You’re pretty easy to sneak up on.”
I would need to work on my situational awareness, if I survived. “I came to talk,” I said.
“Don’t need a gun to talk.”
“Sometimes they help.”
“Not this time.”
“I’ll drop mine if you drop yours.”
“Why don’t you say what you wanted to talk about?” he said. “Then I’ll decide if I want to shoot you or not.”
I needed to be careful here. Saying the wrong thing could get me shot. I hoped my theory supposing he really didn’t like Vinnie was right because it was all I had. The only thing separating me from a bullet was a cold read of a Chinese man I knew from a brief chat at gunpoint and from hitting me over the back of the head. What the hell did I get myself into?
“It’s about your boss,” I said.
“My boss?”
“Vinnie. He’s going down. Whether you take the fall with him is up to you.”
“Vinnie isn’t going anywhere.”
“He’s not as smart and careful as he thinks he is.” Chaoxiang frowned. He hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, which meant he held at least some interest in what I said. “There’s no reason you need to share a cell with him.”
“He’s my boss.”
“But you hate him.”
“Do I?”
I answered him in Cantonese. “I think you do, Chaoxiang. Vinnie doesn’t respect you. You’re nothing but a thug to him, and he demeans you by using the nickname.”
Sam stared at me. Now the malevolence in his eyes yielded to wonder. The gun lowered as his arm fell to his side. “You speak Cantonese.”
“Lived in Hong Kong for three and a half years. Unless I’m wrong about your name, I think you lived there even longer.”
“I did. Almost thirty years.”
“The rug on your floor comes from Hong Kong. I saw many like it while I was there.”
“Yes, it was a gift from my uncle.”
“Vinnie doesn’t care about your rug, Chaoxiang. He doesn’t care about your uncle, and he doesn’t care about you. You’re a means to an end. You
r name means ‘expecting fortune.’ You can’t expect much in the way of riches from Vinnie.”
“I do hate him,” Chaoxiang said with a nod. “What can I do, though?”
“Testify against him. With what you know, I’m sure he’ll go to jail for a long time.”
“What about me? I’ll go to jail, too.”
“Probably. I can’t speak for the law. I’m not official enough to make deals, but I would try to get you the best one possible. Maybe they’d send you back home.”
He smiled. “I would like that.”
“Why haven’t you already gone back?”
“Vinnie threatened my family. He said he knows Tony Rizzo.”
“He does, but he’s only an errand boy. Tony doesn’t protect him, and I don’t think Tony would go after your family.”
Chaoxiang’s shoulders relaxed. He put the gun back in a holster at his side. Having spoken his native tongue, I had no problem thinking of him as Chaoxiang. “Why is Vinnie going down?” he said.
“The death of Paul Fisher.”
“You know.”
“I know enough. I know he was beaten in the church tower and thrown through the window, which probably killed him.”
“The other guy did it. The big one.”
“Sal,” I said.
“Yes. We were supposed to rough Paul up. Sal got . . . carried away. I think he thought Paul would survive the fall.” Chaoxiang closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t mind beating people. I’m good at it. But I’m not a killer. Vinnie takes bets and now he loans money. It shouldn’t require killing.”
“No, it shouldn’t.” An image rushed into my head. I remembered it from the crime scene and from my recent perusal of all the photos thereof. Paul Fisher’s wrecked car made an abrupt stop against a tree. The passenger’s seat had been moved pretty far forward, as if someone Alice’s height had recently been in the car. The driver’s seat matched it—dead even. Paul had about ten inches on Alice. He couldn’t have driven so cramped. “You drove Paul’s car into the tree. Maybe you bailed out before it hit, but you were behind the wheel.”