by Michael Lion
He nodded weakly, in the middle of a prayer for his thumb.
“You’re not hiding out in this toilet because you’re afraid of retribution, are you, Sonny? Whoever this kingpin is doesn’t give a shit where the guns came from, does he? That’d be a waste of time. He’s looking for the shooters. And he has to come through you to find out who they are. Once he does, he’s going to kill you, because your usefulness will be over, but your liability will continue, won’t it?”
Another weak nod.
“It’s Tran, isn’t it?” My voice was like a mausoleum door slamming shut. “And you knew who Tran was when he came to you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he answered in a hoarse whisper. “I knew him. I’d known he was alive for a while.”
“How?”
“Chinatown. Word was there was some new talent on the scene, some kid runnin’ a minor numbers racket in and out of the less profitable fronts, gift shops and shit. I got a couple connections down there, tell me he’s building face, working through respect so he won’t get snuffed by the old men before he can turn a profit and get bought out.”
“And,” I said slowly, “get an invite to join the Triad.”
“Right. Chinese protection racket. Runs like any big corporation. Closer to fuckin’ AT&T than the Mafia. Controls all the major action goes down in Chinatown—gambling, prostitution, drugs, all the regular stuff. They let small timers go ’til they can be bought. That’s where they tend to be smarter than the fuckin’ spics and niggers, who just kill each other. The Triads at least make a civilized offer before they start getting trigger happy.”
“Sonny,” I said, waggling his thumb to keep him alert, “don’t make me have to break anything else. My hand’s getting tired.”
He shook his head vigorously. “No man. No shit. Swear to God.” With his free hand he took the pocket square out and mopped his forehead.
“How long have you been working for Cynthia?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Years. She came to me a long time ago and said she needed a little help with the whole protection thing in the islands. Said she’d give me five percent of anything I could siphon off and funnel back to her. So I set up a couple of false investment accounts, here and on the mainland, got a bag man to handle the actual payoffs and do the deposits, and I’m in business.”
“Parenti,” I said coldly.
The pain was tiring him out. He nodded weakly.
I dropped his hand and backed off him. He winced and drew the fractured paw in next to his chest. I held the piece in front of him. “I’m going to keep this,” I said, glancing over at the still snoozing Mack. “I don’t think he’s going to mind.”
Sonny followed my glance and then suddenly looked away from his bodyguard. “Oh, yeah,” I said menacingly, “I don’t expect any heat from your end of this mess, you dig? The Ohana may not be looking for you right now, but I could pique their interest if I thought I had a reason.” I drew my finger across my throat. “A little revenge is better than none. If I can’t get the triggerman, I’ll take you as a consolation prize.”
He was gently probing the two broken fingers.
I gave him a second and then leered down at him. “Do I really have to ask?”
He momentarily stopped nursing the hand. Then he drooped his eyebrows and looked at the ground. “He’s in the penthouse suite of the Royal Hawaiian, down in Waikiki.” He looked up at me with true fear in his eyes. “Don’t fuck this up, punk. Just say your piece and get the hell out. There’s gonna be a whole lotta people lose a whole lot more than money if this thing goes bad.”
That stopped me, and pushed another player out of the shadows and into the light. “Waterston,” I said.
Sonny didn’t even respond. He knew I knew.
“Greedy son of a bitch,” was all he said.
Chapter 21
I walked in out of the early evening heat and strutted across the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel like I had just bought the place. One of the most expensive resort hotels in the world and no one gave me a second look. Tourists of various ages and shapes were milling around, with no one checking in or out. The front desk staff was busy with phone calls and people asking for the bathroom. A bellboy dressed in blinding white stood against a bank of house phones waiting for someone to tip him. I passed him on the way to the elevators, and he glanced at me with all the interest of a bartender at a drunk. I stepped in the car and left him looking under his fingernail.
A chime and the elevator doors hissed apart. The penthouse foyer that the elevators emptied directly into was a miniature of the lobby—cool and quiet and white as a marble crypt. There was a penthouse at each end, guarded by double doors that were made expressly for giving the impression of money. One beach view, one city view. I flipped a mental coin and went city side.
There was no sound. The door to the stairwell was a hidden job cut out of the wall next to the penthouse. I gave it a push and swept it open, checking my options. The air-conditioning breathed gently at the nape of my neck as I put an ear to the penthouse door. Soft music and running water greeted me. I tried the white enamel knob. No go. Another ear press brought a couple of voices. Giggling. Kids just off the beach. Family sounds.
I spun on a heel and marched back to the beach view. When I put my ear to the door it gave a little. The latch hadn’t caught, and slightly warmer air flowed out against my cheek. I pushed it open and walked carefully to keep from tripping over the rock in my stomach.
The suite probably went for two-grand a day, not including room service. The entryway could have slept a large family and had enough little benches and chairs for all of them to take their shoes off at once. There were vanity mirrors in gilded frames every four feet or so, and from where I was I could see through two rooms to a large bay window that undoubtedly held the requisite breathtaking ocean view. Ivory curtains were drawn over it. I pulled the nine-millimeter I had borrowed from Mack the Softie out of my belt. It didn’t make me feel any better.
The first door on the left was a bathroom as big as the entryway and foyer put together. All the knobs were chunks of crystal like glass fists, and they glinted in the soft light in concert with the brass fixtures. The tub was a four-seater done in white marble with pink and black veins and had water in it that had been standing a while, the bubbles evaporated to a milky foam residue around the water’s edge. A shaving kit lay broken open next to the sink, a man’s razor in the soap dish. I sniffed for perfume. Nothing to suggest a woman.
The next room was a study with expensive books in expensive shelves around an expensive desk. What wasn’t wood or paper was leather and hadn’t been touched since the last pass of the cleaning crew. I let it keep looking clean.
The carpet was new enough that it crackled softly under my sneakers. The warm breeze off the water suddenly unsettled the curtains in the corner of my vision, and I froze momentarily against the wall opposite the study. The huge front room came to me in slices around the edge of a palatial archway. There was a fresh bouquet of flowers on a small tea table, and the breeze carried lilac and pikake scent with it. Beyond that a full-size grand piano appeared, stuck in the corner like they had gone to all the trouble of moving it in and then couldn’t decide where to put it. Just in front of its stringbed was the spine of an ivory-colored sofa. I relaxed and dropped the piece to my side. There was no need.
The curtains billowed inward again as I crept up to Parenti. From the side he looked asleep, his head resting serenely against the back of the sofa like he had dozed off in front of the tube. Before him on a small ottoman was a crystal ashtray with a single cigarette in it that had burned undisturbed into a neat roll of ash. His hands were resting just so on a white towel thrown lazily across his lap. It was all he was wearing, pinched in the roll of his stomach. From the look of his skin and the smell of cordite that still hung in the air, he couldn’t have been dead more than half-an-hour.
I stood over him for a long time and then said quietly, “You coul
dn’t have told me the truth, could you? You dumb son-of-a bitch.”
The curtains’ windy motion was getting creepy, so I stepped over and closed the window. Stepping back behind the couch, I closed Parenti’s eyes because it seemed like the thing to do, and it got rid of a weird feeling in my gut. The deep red stain that stretched down the back of the sofa was still shiny damp. On impulse I looked behind me at the piano. The bullet had gone into the soundboard behind the extreme bass end of the keyboard. I checked the hole. The slug had been removed.
I took off my t-shirt and wiped everything I remembered touching. Then I went back to the front door, shut it with the Do Not Disturb sign on the handle, put my shirt back on, and threw the place.
It was immediately obvious that had he lived, Parenti was not planning to return to Rodeo Drive any time soon, if ever. He had twenty or thirty two-piece double-breasteds in the walk-in closet. They all went in a pile. Nothing. In the pocket of a raincoat I found a pair of leather gloves and put them on.
I decided the study looked a little too clean. I tumbled all the books from their cases and pulled all the drawers in the desk, flipping them over and looking for false bottoms. Came up dry.
Parenti was lolled on the middle cushion of the sofa, and I took the chance that whatever I was looking for wasn’t under it. The other two cushions went for nothing. A small coffee table with a letter drawer held a pen and pad of paper with a phone number on it. I grabbed the phone and dialed. A pizza joint. I asked the mouth-breather taking orders if he had one listed for Ben Parenti. He asked me what was on it. I said I didn’t know. He said there was no Parenti on his current order list. I hung up.
Across from the bay window was a gas fireplace, which struck me as being even more worthless than the pool. There was nothing to suggest that anything but gas had ever been burned in it. I wandered into the bedroom and sat on the end of the unmade bed with my chin in my hand and wrote a little play.
Parenti comes flying into town because he knows something and can either sell it or save himself with it. To who? Could be anybody. Meanwhile, Cynthia is killing her own girls like a lion eats her cubs, an odd course of action at a time when the last thing she needs is more attention from the press and the cops. What information could set them both in motion? It ultimately doesn’t matter much, because Big Ben decides he wants to take a bath in his penthouse suite. While he’s soaking in the bubbles there’s a knock on the door. He ignores it since he didn’t order room service, and that turns out to be the last mistake he ever makes. The next thing he hears is a voice asking him to get out of the tub, it’s got some things to say. Parenti gets up, grabbing a towel, and is guided into the living room. There, he realizes his predicament. He decides to play his trump early and hoses the room with information. Whoever came in isn’t impressed with what Parenti has to offer. Why? Only one possibility—he, or she, already knows the story.
So they calmly put a bullet in his brain, take the time to remove the slug from the premises, and split.
Now, I’m sitting in front of someone with a gun, and I think I have something they want. If I can’t prove it, they’re going to kill me. I would want my proof with me.
I got up off the bed and wandered slowly back to Parenti. He still looked asleep. I slipped the towel off his lap and picked up the three handwritten pages of stationery that fluttered to the floor. I put the towel back.
It was a love letter from Josephine. I flipped and checked the bottom of the final page. She had signed it “Ione”. I didn’t have to read more than the first paragraph or two before I knew I’d been right: men like Robert Waterston don’t hire expensive P.I.’s to peep on their daughters; they hire them when they think they’re being screwed. Josephine/Ione promised Parenti she would get off that ship because Denise Waterston had told her some very valuable information: Naomi Nguyen, another whore in Cynthia’s stable, was not who she claimed to be. She was Triad. And for some reason that made Cynthia Ming nervous. The letter didn’t say why.
But I knew why.
I popped my lighter to a corner and set the flaming pages in the ashtray. While they burned I went through and double checked any place I might have left a print. When I was satisfied, I left, leaving the door open, and scuttled down the fire stairs.
The outside heat hit me like a blast furnace after the meat locker air-conditioning of the penthouse. I stood in front of the Kalakaua entrance for about a minute until a cab pulled up to let an elderly woman and her pocket-sized dog onto the curb. I jumped in, almost crushing the dog she had dropped on the sidewalk, and said one word to the cabbie.
“Chinatown.”
Chapter 22
Asian culture is the most tenacious in the world. It doesn’t compromise or assimilate. It has been around for seven thousand years and likes itself just the way it is. That’s the reason every Chinatown in every city in the world looks exactly the same—two or three or ten blocks of transplanted downtown Shanghai. Honolulu’s enclave is no exception. You turn a corner off of Hotel Street and Nuuanu, and the smell and the steam hit like you just stepped into a back alley Hong Kong kitchen at lunchtime in the summer.
Everything is a hum. The streets are filled with old toothless merchants screaming at their customers and each other in Cantonese, and children fighting over extra char su biao in front of the bakeries. The gutters are filled with garbage, mostly spoiled food, and you get the feeling that everything, including human beings, is stacked on top of everything else because it has always been that way—damp and hot and crowded and noisy for centuries.
Every storefront sign from the big nightclubs to the tiniest dry cleaning place is done in spectacular neon, and half the restaurants are called Fat’s. I got out and stood in front of one. Fat’s Dim Sum. Fat was standing on the front stoop, picking his fingernails with a small pocketknife and living up to his name. He almost completely blocked the front door to his restaurant, a bright red thing with a huge dragon on it in dramatic relief. I stood and watched him for a minute and then trotted off up the street, folding into the humanity like a rock dropped into a muddy pool.
Numbers runners look the same in any society. I collared one rushing along the sidewalk in front of a small market with rows of dressed ducks hanging in the windows. As I swung him around and his large, emotionless, almost black eyes settled on my own, I brought a carefully folded twenty up between us and let him stare at it. I said “Tran Nguyen.” He pointed down the street and said the name of a pawnshop that I could see a couple of blocks down. As I was looking, he snatched the money and disappeared down an alley, his handful of flashpaper and number sheets fluttering crisply as he ran, dodging around tenement stoops and their slow-moving elderly tenants.
The entrance to the pawnshop was just off the street in a recessed doorway, with two tall windows on either side full of rip-off designer sunglasses and Rolexes with the gold flaking off them. I pushed the door open and stepped inside, a dangling bell announcing my arrival. There was a woman sitting quietly on a stool behind the counter, the top of which was plastered with every kind of cheap jewelry ever made—false jade and gold plate predominating. She was folding origami cranes out of tiny squares of gold paper and dropping them into a large cardboard box at her feet. Her face was the kindest I had ever seen, and sat atop a squat, unattractive little body dressed in blue polyester slacks and a faded and patched pink sweater that had once been a five-button but now had only three. She didn’t look up from her cranes until I said, “I was told Tran Nguyen could be found here.”
She glanced up and smiled teeth stained with decades of strong tea. Then she screamed something in Chinese and dropped her smile and her head back down to the work at hand.
A second later a beaded curtain was swooshed apart behind her, and a man of her almost identical proportions stepped around and leaned over the counter between us. He leered at me like I had scared his wife and was about two steps from paying dearly for it.
I said, “Tran Nguyen. Where is he?”
More puzzled and slightly intimidating looks, more Chinese practically yelled into my left eye. It was no use asking if he spoke English—even if he did, I got the feeling he wasn’t going to give me the pleasure. I pulled Li’s locket out of the watch-pocket of my jeans and handed it to him. I added, “I want to see Tran. Right now.”
He instantly assumed the air of a jeweler appraising a questionable piece, holding the locket at arm’s length and squinting and making his lips into an “0”. I thought he figured me for a seller, and I was about to snatch it back when he figured out the latch and popped it open. He snapped it shut almost immediately and, without another sound, dashed back through the beads. I stared at the woman and she stared at her cranes.
I heard steps go back quite a ways and some doors open and close. Then the sounds were repeated in reverse and the old man came back through the beads, followed by another, larger man who stopped just beyond the curtain. He took a look at me, nodded, and disappeared. The old man motioned me behind the counter. I said, “Thank you,” and stepped past him into the hallway.
The walls on either side were stacked high with pawned merchandise, tagged, but not filed or situated in any orderly way. I saw the broad back of a brown suit step left through a door about twenty feet down. When I went through the same door it opened into a sort of waiting room. There was a small Buddhist altar next to a silk pillow on the floor for kneeling, and that was all. It looked like the kind of place where people received bad news. I stepped up to the opposite door and opened it.
This room was immaculately appointed in ancient Chinese carpeting and drapery, with a huge cherry-wood conference table in the center. When the door shut behind me, a hand went on my shoulder and another gently took the Beretta from my jeans. They were two men I had never seen before. Standing at the far end of the conference table, the locket and chain in a neat pile in front of him, was a man I had seen before, ghost-like, in the faces of his two dead sisters.