Neon Dragon mk-1

by John F. Dobbyn

  “Tell me something about Anthony.”

  Gail was the first to speak. “He’s a man, Mr. Knight.”

  My look said I didn’t grasp her meaning.

  “That’s not slang, Mr. Knight. I mean he’s mature, more than you’d think from his age. He came through a lot of growing up in the last year.”

  “How so?”

  Gail nodded to Rasheed and gestured at the door next to him leading to the other room. Rasheed closed it.

  “You know about his father? I mean being a judge and a football hero and gonna be on the Supreme Judicial Court? All that was a heavy burden for Anthony.”

  “Burden?”

  “That’s right. Anthony felt he had to be just as good at the same things. He couldn’t do it. Anthony’s got a lot of talents, but they’re different. Like last year, he had to play football. But he couldn’t just play football. He had to be as good as his father, or maybe his father’s legend.”

  “Did his father put pressure on him?”

  “I don’t know, but he didn’t have to. Anthony put pressure on himself that nobody could live up to. When he knew he wasn’t making it at football, he went into a depression. He couldn’t study, then his grades started going to pieces. Then he got more depressed.”

  Rasheed got into the conversation with a quiet voice. “Did he tell you about the attempted suicide?”

  Gail caught his eye and his voice clutched. It was apparently not a well-known fact. We needed some ground rules.

  “Listen, folks. Anthony’s on trial for murder. Nobody’s going to fight for his side but me and the lawyer I work for. I need to know everything I can about him. I’ll sift out what I need. And all of it’s confidential.”

  Rasheed stole a quick look at Gail like a batter getting the sign from the third-base coach. She apparently gave him the green light.

  “Last year, about finals time in the spring, we were supposed to have a meeting about setting up finals tutorials for some of the people we were helping. Anthony didn’t show up.”

  I jumped in for a quick one. “Was Anthony a helper or being helped?”

  Gail took it. “He was a helper from day one. He had a good prep-school education, which is different from a lot of the kids they admit. He got involved with us right away, in spite of the time football was taking.”

  I nodded. “Go back to the meeting, Rasheed.”

  “When he didn’t show up, we called him, but no answer. A little while later we decided to go check out his room.”

  He stopped for a moment. I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a chance to ask, “Why were you worried about him? I mean, anything could have kept him from one meeting.”

  “Not Anthony.” They said it together, and Gail went on. “He took these helping sessions very seriously.”

  Rasheed went on. “Besides, he’d been getting more and more into depression. We kind of…” He glanced at Gail. “… kept an eye on him. We tried to talk to him, like build up his confidence. But we weren’t getting anywhere. We wanted him to get some help.”

  “So did you find him?”

  Rasheed looked down at the bracelet he was fidgeting with.

  “Yeah. He was in his room.”

  The pause indicated the need for urging. “Was it the suicide attempt?”

  Rasheed just nodded. Gail’s eyes watered over, and I thought about dropping it, but I needed to learn all I could.

  “How?” Neither one was looking at me, but Rasheed made a gesture across his wrist.

  “What did you do?”

  “We put pressure on it. Got him to the hospital. He did OK. We got him in time.”

  I thought I heard Gail say almost under her breath, “No, we didn’t.”

  I looked at her. She was so sincere she had my heart as well as my attention. When our eyes met, maybe it showed.

  “How was he afterwards?”

  “He was OK.” Rasheed’s version.

  “No, he wasn’t.” Gail didn’t need the third-base coach. “He never really recovered from it.”

  I said, “He seemed to be healthy when I saw him recently.”

  “You mean physically. Yes, the stitches healed, and he got his energy back. But there was something missing.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. You know how sometimes there’s something about a person that almost defines them. You can’t put your finger on it, but when it’s not there, it’s like emptiness.”

  I wondered if Gail could have had more than a passing affection for whatever that something was. Rasheed looked at her gently with what could have been either agreement or empathy, or maybe more.

  There was a jolt that brought us all out of it when the door to the other room swung open. A string of high-pitched jive rolled like a babbling stream off the lips of a six-foot, rail-thin dude who came through the door in full swing. He had a walk that had arms, feet, hips, and head syncopating with each other to a beat somewhere in his own universe.

  The gist of the jive, as nearly as I could put it together, was the registration of a complaint that the local rap station had been put to rest. It flowed until he spotted the unexpected visitor. Then I saw “the freeze.”

  It took me back through the past, and it’s like bike riding. You never forget. I learned it when I spent some time with kids in a Puerto Rican settlement house. I was seriously Puerto Rican at that time and looking for cultural identity, not the well-adjusted biracial of current times. That was when I learned about “the freeze.”

  It’s like a babbling brook, where all of the happy molecules are monolithic and bouncing in easy rhythm with each other. Then a molecule from another kind of brook is introduced, and in a sort of instant chemical reaction, the brook freezes solid, but only under the top layer. On the surface, to the untrained eye, the brook babbles on.

  My white face was the molecule from another brook. I was tuned to the snap freeze, as I’m sure Gail and Rasheed were. I was equally sure that none of the three gave me credit for being in on the phenomenon.

  I didn’t sense it at all when I walked in on Gail and Rasheed, but the meter was pinning with our new arrival. What it meant was that the surface bopping would go on, but any information I would get from then on would be carefully screened for white ears. With him present, I’d probably had the best of the harvest from the others as well.

  Gail took the lead. “Abdul, this is Mr. Knight. He’s Anthony’s lawyer. This is Abdul Shabaz.”

  I pegged him at about the junior year, but somehow the Harvard accent had not adulterated his singy-swingy dialect.

  “Hey, Anthony’s ma man. Please to make your acquaintance, Mr. Knight.”

  I couldn’t tell if he wanted to shake or high-five, so I just nodded. “Nice to meet you, Abdul.”

  “How’s ma man doin’?”

  I suddenly realized that I didn’t really know. I mentally filled that in as my next appointment.

  “He’s all right, considering.”

  “Whachu want us to do? You name it. You got it.”

  “Give me six Phi Beta Kappa divinity students who’ll swear they were with Anthony all day Sunday.”

  I thought it, but I didn’t say it. If I had, I had a feeling that Abdul would have had them at my doorstep in the morning.

  “I need to find a friend of Anthony’s by the name of Terry Blocher. Do you know him?”

  “Terry’s a member. You just cool it. I’ll get him up here.”

  I cooled it, while Abdul walked the walk into the next room. I could hear phone sounds and a pause. Then I heard Abdul in a semimuffled tone that only carried through both rooms. Abdul was not cut out for espionage.

  “Terry, ma man. Git yourself over here. We got Anthony’s mouthpiece. He wants to see you.”

  With my eyebrows up and a restrained smile, I looked at Gail. “‘ Mouthpiece ’? Are they running a forties’ film festival? I haven’t heard that since Little Caesar on AMC.”

  Her eyes went to the ceiling, and she just shoo
k her head.

  In about five minutes, a white student of about nineteen, shorter and heftier than Abdul, walked in. He had a roundish face crowned with the kind of dull blond curls that never seem to need a comb.

  Introductions were made, and I got down to it.

  “Terry, Anthony tells me that you went with him to Chinatown on Sunday. He said you suggested having dinner there.”

  “It was his idea, but that’s right. I went with him.”

  I was slightly jangled by the correction, but it was a minor point.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, we went in on the train about two. We went to a place called the Ming Tree.”

  “Did you pick the restaurant or did Anthony?”

  “No, he did. I’d never been there before.”

  “Had he?”

  “I don’t know. He just picked it.”

  “OK. Then what?”

  “We had dinner. Then we went down to the street. It was like… pandemonium. I had to get out of there.”

  “So you left him where?”

  “Outside the restaurant. I walked to Park Street.”

  “Did Anthony have a gun?”

  He gave me one of those whose-side-are-you-on looks and silence.

  “I’d be happy to hear, ‘no.’”

  “OK, no.”

  “Did you see anyone there with a gun?”

  “No.”

  I racked my brain for any nugget of gold that I should dig while I was still at the mine. None occurred at the moment, but now I knew where I could find him.

  I turned my mind to surviving the recrossing of Mass. Avenue. If I made it, I was going to take the train to the Suffolk County prison.

  16

  Over the years, I’ve found that visits to clients in prison fall roughly into two categories. First, there are those where the visitee shows some combination of hostility, fear, sullenness, whatever, but also a hefty flavoring of embarrassment at being confined in housing that does not exactly reek of honor. The second involves those where the disgrace aspect of the confines is as far removed from the outlook of the client as anchovies from a chocolate milkshake. My guess is that the second group has its own moral code that exists on a nonintersecting plane with that of “the system.” They have therefore not failed under the system; they’ve merely been caught by it.

  When Anthony walked into that sterile interviewing room, he still looked like a classic example of the first type. While some slip into prison garb like a loose bathrobe, it seemed to clash with every aspect of Anthony’s bearing, as if the clerk had dressed the mannequin in the wrong suit. He was beginning to show the wear of confinement with an excess of time to suffer the bombardment of negative thoughts. He forced a smile that said acting was not his forte.

  “All things considered, Anthony, how’re you doing?”

  “I’m OK, Mr. Knight. How are you?”

  I was impressed that he asked.

  “Good. We’re covering all the bases. I hope you know that Mr. Devlin is the best there is. And this is the only case I’m working on. So you have our full attention. Have you heard from your dad?”

  “He’s been in every day.” His voice was full of something that I took for shame.

  “How’s he taking it?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. He was looking somewhere between the table and his shoes, and I think if he looked up, I’d have seen drops of moisture.

  “I can’t… I let him down so much. I just can’t be what he is.”

  “Did he ever say you should?”

  He thought about it and shook his head rather than try an unsteady voice.

  “Did you ever think that what he wants is a son, not a clone? Maybe he just wants you at your best, whatever direction you take.”

  He looked up, past me to the ceiling. I was right about the moisture. There was some despair in there, too.

  “I guess my direction is pretty clear now.”

  I caught his eyes and brought them back to mine.

  “Anthony. Did you murder Mr. Chen?”

  He seemed surprised at the question. “No, Mr. Knight. I didn’t.”

  “Then don’t even consider giving up. Mr. Devlin and I can do everything for you except keep your spirits up. That’s your full-time job right now. Maybe seeing your father would help both of you.”

  I can’t say that I made any inroads, but he looked as if he was thinking.

  “Anthony, I’d like to have the luxury of being able to lead up to this slowly, but I’ve got to make every minute count. For your sake. I was over at Harvard. I talked to Gail and Rasheed.”

  For the first time in the conversation I saw the lights go on. “And the Big Bopper, Abdul.”

  I even caught the makings of a grin on that one. I regretted having to get heavy.

  “They told me about the suicide attempt.” So much for the grin. “You don’t have to explain it. I just feel terribly sorry about the pain you must have been in at the time. What I’ve got to ask you now is this. Is there any chance at all that you could be there again?”

  The tears had dried. He was looking right at me, which helped with the belief factor.

  “No.” He shook his head for emphasis. “Whatever pain my dad’s going through, I won’t put him through that.”

  I had to make a judgment. I came down on the side of running the risk. “OK, Anthony. I haven’t said anything to anyone here. I won’t.”

  He just nodded, but I think the trust meant something.

  “Do you need anything?”

  He shook his head. “I appreciate everything you’re doing, Mr. Knight.”

  You have no idea, Anthony. I was thinking about Harry and Red Shoes.

  I stood up and reached across to put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I know that between the two of us, you have the tougher job, Anthony. But try to keep up your confidence. You might use some of that heavy time for praying.”

  “I do, Mr. Knight. A lot.”

  “Then you’ve got three of us working for you. And think about what I said about your father.”

  He stood up, too. Before we went in opposite directions, I thought I’d double-check something.

  “Last Sunday. You said you went into Chinatown about two. You wanted Chinese food?”

  “Terry came by. He wanted to go in. So I went with him.”

  “His idea.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you picked the Ming Tree Restaurant. Why?”

  “No, sir. He did.”

  For some reason it wrangled me that the two disagreed on the probably minor point of who suggested the Chinatown trip.

  “Had you been there before?”

  “Not that I can remember. It was just convenient to everything that was going on.”

  “The New Year’s business.”

  “That’s right.”

  I toyed with the idea of confronting him with the disparity between their stories, but on intuition I decided to file it for another day. While I had him, I thought I’d get out a thought that had been making shuttle trips between my conscious and subconscious.

  “Assuming you didn’t do it, which I do, and there are two witnesses who say they saw you do it, it’s got to be either a mistake or a frame-up. I have trouble with mistake. In that neighborhood, you don’t exactly blend. That means frame-up. Why you?”

  “Maybe that’s why. I’ve been thinking about it. I stood out like a sore thumb. People would believe the witnesses if they said they noticed anything I did, even with everything going on. I was convenient.”

  “That’s true. But if someone were planning to murder the old Chinese man, they really lucked out to have you pass through the neighborhood at the right moment.”

  “If it weren’t me, I guess they would have picked someone else.”

  “I guess.” And someone else would be on trial, and I’d still be doing nasty litt
le errands for Whitney Caster.

  I replayed every card, shuffled the deck, and re-replayed them again and again in my mind over a good scrod dinner at the 99 down by the Boston Globe offices. I was up to my eyeballs in nagging little questions and inconsistencies, like, Whose idea was it to go to Chinatown? Who picked the restaurant? And who cares? Except, why do they disagree on such a minor point?

  Assuming Anthony was not guilty, why would someone decide to frame him, when it was mere chance that brought him to that neighborhood, let alone to the right spot on the right street at the right time? Why in the world would anyone shoot the old man anyway? Was the old man the real target, or a means of getting at Anthony-or Judge Bradley? Another possibility was that the shooting was what Mike Loftus’s column in the Globe intimated-another act of random violence. On the other hand, I’ve never seen random violence result in a carefully constructed, almost airtight frame-up.

  Then there was the card I didn’t want to turn up, but it was certainly there in the deck. What if Anthony were guilty? That would, in fact, simplify things by giving simple answers to most of the other questions, leaving only the question, “Why?”

  Two eyewitnesses with no apparent reason to lie, plus Anthony’s having the perfect opportunity in the middle of Chinese New Year’s pandemonium, were on the side of “guilty.”

  As I chased the raisins through a bread pudding for dessert, I realized that the only real argument on the side of “innocent” was the straight-up look in Anthony’s eyes when he said he didn’t do it. And even lie detectors can be fooled by a clever subject.

  There was one other thing, and this was the itch I couldn’t scratch. Why would poor, sweet, defenseless Red Shoes risk, and in fact give, her life to get me to help cool, together, unruffled Mei-Li, who seemed about as blissfully problem-free as Barney?

  When I got home, I called Harry Wong.

  He was slightly out of breath. I gathered it was not from jogging-more likely from getting to the phone while keeping his breathing as shallow as possible not to disturb the rib cage.

  “How’s the recovery? Those ribs must be painful.”

  “I’ve seen healthier ribs with barbecue sauce. What’re you up to, Michael? How’s the case going?”

  “Well, it’s like this, Harry. I’ve got enough questions to keep Jeopardy on the air for a year. But there’s one in particular. I have just a hunch that if I can find an answer to this one, a lot of other things will fall in line.”