Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  “No laws broken here,” Ms. Masterson said. “But the police from Canada are arriving tomorrow morning. We’re holding all three of them, awaiting extradition. Once they’re returned to Canada, the story will probably be different.”

  By the time we left the county police office, it was completely dark. A county cop gave us a ride back to the park and waited until we got into the Toyota and drove out of the lot. He gave us a quick wave as we went past him, idling his engine. I saw him follow us a few blocks, just to be sure, I assumed, that we were safe.

  “You hungry?” I asked Corinne.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “But I am.”

  We went to the Eastern Palace. This late, there were only two tables with diners. Corinne and I sat down like customers at one of the empty ones. I was right: when a restaurant closes for the first half of the day, business for the second half is always going to be off. Janet, one of the waitresses—one whom Mr. Leong had, in fact, called in on her off night to cover for Corinne—waited on us. We both ordered the same thing. Zhou. Rice gruel. The same dish Langston and I had prepared my first morning in St. Louis. Cold cooked rice, usually leftover rice, recooked in a pot with about twice as much water (or in the case of Li, who was running the kitchen that night, a rich chicken broth) as rice. All the liquid turns the rice into a thick slurry, soupy with a pleasant texture, one that accents whatever is added to it. In our case, we ordered it with pickled Chinese greens and a couple of dishes of chopped coriander on the side for garnish. It was comfort food, Chinese style.

  We ate. We didn’t say much. It was fun to be diners in the place where we worked.

  “Let’s go to your apartment,” Corinne said when I’d parked the Toyota on the street between our two places. We did. It was dark inside. Langston was out wherever the chefs and other restaurant workers were meeting that night after their places closed. Preferably a place where Bao Yu could tag along. We went to the front room that was my bedroom and stood next to one another, looking out onto the street. I still hadn’t seen the crow. The canopy of the sycamore tree across the street was so thick with leaves, now in various hues of gray and black, shadowy in the dark, that there could have been a nest somewhere in it. I had my hands in my pockets. Corinne reached over and slipped her arm through mine and left it there.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “Nice not to have to worry about someone threatening me,” she said. “How about you? How do you feel?”

  I shrugged. “Surprised.”

  “Surprised?” Corinne said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I figured all along you’d actually taken the diamonds.”

  She snorted softly. “No, you didn’t.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t. I just wanted to get your attention.” It was what she’d said to me earlier, what seemed like a long time ago but was only earlier that afternoon. Then she asked me the same question I’d asked her.

  “What were you going to do with it once you got my attention?”

  “‘Later’ is what you said.”

  She moved close enough against me that I could feel her head nodding on my shoulder by way of answer. Then she pivoted to face me and looped her other arm through mine.

  “Yes, indeed,” she said. “And right now . . .” She pressed in. “Right now is later.”

  43

  Rule #76: A visit to the offices of any authority figure that is so short you don’t have to sit down is usually a good one.

  “This is Lieutenant Carlson, who’s visiting us from the Great White North,” Ms. Masterson said.

  It was two days after all the excitement in the park. Corinne and I had to ask for a couple of hours off at the Eastern Palace to go the law offices of Brown, Bernson & Wilkes. Mr. Leong wasn’t happy about it. Especially after he’d given us the evening off two days ago to meet with Sung in the park. He didn’t grumble too much, though.

  We met Ms. Masterson in the law office’s lobby. We didn’t have to be there. She’d called, though, and told us that Ping was asking to speak to Corinne and that while Corinne was under no obligation to do so, it might be interesting to see what Ping had to say. I thought I’d had enough “interesting” to last for the rest of the spring and well into the summer. But Corinne wanted to go.

  “I’m curious about what he has to say,” she told me. So we went.

  The law office’s lobby was larger than the entire dining room of the Eastern Palace. Ms. Masterson introduced Lieutenant Carlson, a special investigator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the local district attorney, Mr. Shannon. We stood around for a few minutes, studying the potted plants and a big frosted-glass screen that ran the entire length of the lobby. Muted pastel lights slowly ran together behind the glass, the patterns changing and flowing. Then a woman appeared. I guessed she was a secretary, even though I reflected on how sexist that assumption might be. It was right, anyway. She led us through a door—along a hall decorated with framed jerseys and other sports memorabilia from St. Louis sports teams—and into a conference room paneled in dark oak, with a thick, expensive-looking rug spread over a polished wooden floor. There were a dozen leather upholstered chairs around a table that could have accommodated a Thanksgiving dinner for most of the people in my apartment building. Although Langston and I were almost certainly the only occupants of the building who celebrated Thanksgiving.

  “Make yourselves comfortable, please,” the woman said pleasantly.

  “Mind if I use your facilities?” the lieutenant asked her. She gave him directions. Everyone but Ms. Masterson and I sat down. I went over and leaned against one wall. Ms. Masterson stood against the other, so we were on both sides of the table, facing one another. Almost immediately, another door at the other end of the room opened silently. A tall black man came in. He wore thin gold-framed glasses, a short Afro gone almost completely gray, and a suit that, had I not been so secure in my self-image, would have made me feel shabby in my pressed khakis, light blue Oxford-cloth dress shirt, and dark blue sports jacket. Behind him was Ping. He may have been in the same suit he’d been wearing two days before in the park. There wasn’t a wrinkle or a crease out of place. I assumed he’d made bail. I wondered where the bodyguard was. I wondered how he was walking.

  “My name is Orvis Wilkes,” the black man said. He and Ping both sat. “I am Mr. Ping’s attorney.” He nodded to the district attorney and to Detective Martin-Lourdes. “Chuck; Sydney.” They nodded back at him.

  Then Mr. Shannon introduced Ms. Masterson and Corinne and me. Just then Lieutenant Carlson came back from the restroom. Ping looked up. Just for a second, I saw surprise on his face. It was a moment, just a flicker.

  “This is Lieutenant Carlson,” Mr. Shannon said. “From the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

  Carlson looked at Ping. Ping nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Lieutenant Carlson heads the Asian Gang Crime Task Unit out of Quebec,” Mr. Shannon said.

  Then Mr. Shannon turned back to Ping’s lawyer. “Your client requested this meeting.”

  “Yes,” Wilkes said. “But before he says what he wants to say—and let me add that he is doing so against my counsel—I would like someone here to lay out the reason he was arrested in the first place.”

  “You know the charges, Orvis,” Mr. Shannon said. “He was involved in an attempt at extortion. He is a witness to the same. He is the employer of a person who was carrying a weapon illegally. He and that employee are visitors to this country. They both represent a flight risk. We also have reason to believe that he may be connected with an assault on these two”—he inclined his head in Corinne’s direction, then mine—“and another man who was shot.”

  “Yeah,” Wilkes said. He waved the back of his hand. “I know. Reason to believe. But I’d like to know just what all this is really about.”

  “Let me see if I can lay it out for you, counselor,” Ms. Masterson said. “Your client is—we have it on the reliable information provided by Lieutenant Ca
rlson here—in the upper echelons of an organized criminal organization called the Flying Ghosts.”

  Ping seemed to contemplate something in the woodgrain of the table in front of him.

  “The Flying Ghosts entered into a criminal enterprise with Mr. Sung, who was laundering money for them, converting their IGG—” Now it was her turn to glance at Corinne, then me. “Ill-gotten gains,” she translated, “into wholesale diamond purchases. For whatever reason, Mr. Sung became disillusioned with the partnership. He took off with the inventory of his shop, which included diamonds that, in effect, were the property of the Flying Ghosts. Who wanted them back. Understandably. They had information, gained through a woman they had placed into Sung’s confidence. The woman repeated Sung’s story to them. She told them that Sung and Corinne had conspired and had each taken a portion of the diamonds. So Mr. Ping sent a Mr. Bobby Chu to Buffalo to try to find Ms. Chang.”

  “Allegedly,” Mr. Wilkes said.

  “Yes,” Ms. Masterson said. “This is all alleged. I’m just laying out a possible scenario. Allegedly, Bobby Chu went to Buffalo to find Ms. Chang. He did. But he got scared off when this man”—she rocked her head at me—“got into a confrontation with him. By the time he got enough nerve to come back, Ms. Chang had left. He found out she’d gone to St. Louis. Bobby decided to take some initiative, to go after her on his own without checking in with your client, his boss.”

  Ping said nothing. He stared straight ahead. His tie was perfect, straight, with the dimple situated right below the knot. I could see the cuffs of his shirt, monogrammed with PMW.

  “When your client discovered Bobby had taken off,” Ms. Masterson went on, “he assumed Bobby had gotten the diamonds from Ms. Chang and had subsequently decided to go off on his own. So he sent two of his employees to St. Louis. They—ah—inquired about the disposition of the diamonds to Bobby. Who told them the truth. Only they didn’t believe it. They beat Bobby. To death.”

  Ping had apparently decided that not saying anything was a reasonable course to take.

  “Young Bobby no longer being a viable source of information, your client turned to threatening Miss Chang. And assaulting her. Your client and his associates were still under the impression she knew the whereabouts of the diamonds.”

  Mr. Wilkes nodded and said, “It’s an interesting story you’re telling. For a government agent, you have a marvelous imagination.”

  “Story gets better,” Ms. Masterson said. “Mr. Sung took off. Being a romantic, though, after a few weeks he began to pine for the love of his life. So he called her. And told her where he was. Information she immediately passed on to your client. Because, in addition to being Sung’s sweetie—or maybe because she was his sweetie—she was working for your client. Then she and Sung rendezvoused.”

  Lieutenant Carlson shifted in his chair, briefly covered his mouth, and blinked a couple times. But he was listening intently.

  “Then,” Ms. Masterson went on, “in a moment of candor, Mr. Sung explained to his love that, in fact, he’d concocted the whole story about Miss Chang’s involvement. He tried to convince her that if they could throw off the blame, throw it onto Miss Chang, then your client and his colleagues would go after her.”

  It was so quiet in the room I could hear the low hum of the air conditioner. This was the first time it had been warm enough for an air conditioner to cycle on. Summer, almost. I thought about the winter. At Beddingfield. Suffering through that miserable cold. I was ready for the warmth.

  “Leaving Sung and his girlfriend in the clear,” Ms. Masterson went on. “He gave back half the diamonds, ones he’d stolen anyway, and he was left with the other half.”

  Mr. Shannon smiled. “Do tell what happened then?”

  “I shall,” Ms. Masterson said. I got the impression they were enjoying this. I was.

  “Your client requested that Mr. Sung arrange a meeting, to bring Miss Chang to a place where he could then take over and implore her to give up the diamonds.”

  “Which she doesn’t have,” Mr. Shannon said. “And never did.”

  “Correct,” Ms. Masterson said. “Which your client already knew,” she added, looking back at Mr. Wilkes. “He was actually interested in getting to Mr. Sung.”

  “For obvious reasons,” Mr. Shannon said.

  “Obvious?” Mr. Wilkes said. He leaned forward, steepling his fingers and resting them under his nose, elbows on the table. “You have laid out a very interesting scenario. It will be just as interesting to see how much of this you can prove in court. Assuming,” he added, “you actually intend to file charges.”

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Ping suddenly cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me,” he said, in that same smooth and precise diction I’d heard earlier. Definitely a private school education. Somewhere in Hong Kong. An expensive one. “I assume you are recording this, so you will have a record of what I am going to say. Or”—he pointed his forefinger at me—“the Chinese chef who is not Chinese here will be able to translate immediately for you. But I would like to speak to Miss Chang in Mandarin if I may.”

  “Mr. Ping, again I would urge you—” Mr. Wilkes tried to interject; Ping raised his open palm. Wilkes closed his mouth, took his elbows off the table, leaned back, and put his hands on the arms of the chair.

  “Okay with you?” Ms. Masterson asked the district attorney.

  He pursed his lips. “Okay by me.”

  Ms. Masterson looked at Corinne. “You mind?”

  Corinne shook her head.

  Ping cleared his throat and put both palms on the table in front of him. “Miss Chang,” he said. “I owe you an apology. This business got entirely out of hand.”

  Corinne looked levelly at him and didn’t say anything.

  “It got out of hand because I trusted some members of my company to handle a situation. They did not do a good job. They believed Mr. Sung, took his word for it that you were involved. After things . . . developed, the matter finally came to my attention. Unfortunately, this did not happen until you had been put at risk and imposed upon in some regrettable ways.”

  The guy’s voice was mesmerizing. I figured at least some of it was complete crapola. Maybe even all of it. And I was distracted because some of the words he was using in Mandarin were unfamiliar, and I had to try to use context to get the meaning. Still, I was enjoying the soliloquy.

  “When I finally became aware of what was going on, I devised a plan. I thought it would isolate Mr. Sung and allow us to confront him about the irregularities in the matter of our business relationship.”

  He dropped his gaze to the tabletop and tapped the fingers of both hands lightly on it.

  “Again, unfortunately,” he went on after a couple of seconds, “the plan involved using you, giving the impression to Mr. Sung that I believed his explanation. This ensured that he would be present. Do you understand me, Miss Chang?”

  “I do,” she said.

  He glanced at me. “You following this too?”

  “Most of it,” I said. “Sung was using Wenqian as a”—if there was a Mandarin word for “scapegoat” I didn’t know it—“person to take the blame.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “At the same time, you were using her as a”—again, I didn’t know any Mandarin equivalent for “stalking horse”—“way to get to Sung.”

  Ping continued to nod. When he spoke again, it was in English. “I have apologized to Miss Chang,” he said to everyone in the room. “She has been very poorly treated, threatened, and assaulted. It was not my doing. But it was done by my subordinates. So I am responsible. If there are going to be charges against me, my counsel here”—he gestured toward Mr. Wilkes—“will defend me. I have considerable resources to accomplish this. In any event, however, Miss Chang will not in any way face any further contact from me or anyone in my organization.”

  I pressed myself back against the wall. I looked at Ms. Masterson. She pursed her lips and shrugged at me. I looked at Cori
nne. She shrugged, then pursed her lips. I figured those reactions pretty well summed up the morning.

  44

  Rule #88: Appreciate the little things.

  We left the offices and walked a couple of blocks down the street to the sandwich shop where Ms. Masterson, Corinne, and I had met right after I picked Corinne up in Buffalo. This time we were joined by Ms. Martin-Lourdes, Mr. Shannon, and Lieutenant Carlson. We sat around a table and ordered, coffee for everyone but Corinne and me. It was late enough that the lunch crowd had dissolved.

  “You haven’t said anything, Lieutenant Carlson,” Ms. Martin-Lourdes said.

  “Corinne’s lived in Canada,” I said. “She could have translated the proceedings into Canadian for you.”

  A quick smile crossed Lieutenant Carlson’s face. “Nothing seemed to need my commentary at the time,” he said. I got the impression Lieutenant Carlson didn’t give a lot away. I also got the impression he wasn’t someone I’d want to mess around with.

  “What happens to Mr. Sung?” Corinne asked. Even though he treated her like a scapegoat, some part of Corinne clearly still felt sorry for him, I thought. He’d lost everything, including a woman he thought was in love with him.

  “He hasn’t broken any laws in the United States,” Mr. Shannon said. “We might be able to cobble something together. Try to show he put Miss Chang in a dangerous situation. Tough case to make, even if we wanted to try.”

  “How about in Canada?” Ms. Masterson asked.

  “Ah, that would be a different story,” Lieutenant Carlson said. He took a sip of coffee and patted his mouth carefully with a paper napkin. “Technically, he’s probably good for money laundering, abetting a criminal enterprise. But in light of the other aspects of the case we’ll be making against the Flying Ghosts, it’s doubtful the Crown Attorney will want to go to the trouble of bringing charges against Sung. In the end, all he did was take his own inventory and leave. That’s not illegal.”