by Neil Russell
Fat Cat had gotten clearance for us to land at the Hall of Justice, which on a clear day was probably spectacular. Tonight, I would have settled for a controlled crash. Somehow, Lonny got us down on all fours, and as I dashed through the rain with my overnight bag slung on my shoulder, I made my umpteenth promise to never, ever fly in a helicopter again. Somehow, I didn’t think it would hold any better than previous ones.
* * * *
25
Missed Miracles
Page Bacon Hospice was a 1907 Victorian in Haight-Ashbury that had once been a hotel. Even though they deal with the terminally ill, hospices are usually more inviting than hospitals, where noise and indifference compete with healing. There’s no such pretense in a hospice. Men and women who choose to spend their time providing comfort and dignity to the dying don’t watch clocks or consult their pocket copies of union rules when they’re having a bad day. They’re also low-paid or no-paid, so it’s a calling.
And for those who live in big cities and can’t abide homosexuals, I suggest you don’t die, because there’s a better than even chance that the guy who empties your bedpan when you can no longer drag your own ass to the toilet will be gay. I don’t know if that’s because gays are more compassionate or just willing to take unpleasant jobs, but it doesn’t matter.
Retired Detective Stojan Kujovic’s room was on the top floor. As Fat Cat and I trudged up the three long flights of worn carpeting and rickety handrails, we cut through a dense cloud of cannabis. Every six-year-old who squirms twice gets Ritalin jammed down his throat, but we won’t let a guy with his brain rotting away smoke a completely legal joint. My compliments to the bureaucrats who never met a cross they couldn’t be offended by but can’t work up the same passion for the terminally ill.
“This was above and beyond,” I said to Fat Cat.
“You’re telling me. My singer’s working a cruise in Vancouver. Sorry to drag you up here on a night like this, but the guy’s a Serb, and he wants to die over there. Noon tomorrow, he’s outta here. That’s why I blew up your in-box. Seems like a long fuckin’ trip to give it up in front of strangers when you was born in Daly City, but then, it ain’t happening to me.”
“He was on the Chang case?”
“He ran it. They tell me he used to be one handsome dude, but that was a hundred less pounds ago. Some kinda gut cancer. Now he’s the color of vitamin piss and looks like a blowfish. Don’t mind seeing guys busted up or bleeding like Dion. This shit’s not for me.”
“How much did he tell you?”
“Enough to know you need to hear it from the horse. That, and he got a hard-on that he has to meet the man with the plan.’ You got a plan?”
“Not that I know of, but I’ll see if I can dance to it.”
Wes Crowe again. Jake calls it badge disease. They all think they’re geniuses at reading people, so they want to give you the I’m-a-cop-motherfucker-stare. Jake believes half the cops protecting their assholes in prison would still be on the job if they hadn’t insisted on a face-to-face. They know it’s a pain in the ass to get a wiretap approved, and that most come up worthless, but they still insist on locking eyes. IA’s biggest job is making sure there’s film in the camera and enough cuffs to go around.
Detective Kujovic’s room was small and close. Twin beds, a thrift shop chair, a couple of lamps and a poster of Dirty Harry brandishing his .44. He was sharing it with an emaciated young man, not more than twenty-five, who probably didn’t top seventy pounds. From the sores on his face, I guessed AIDS. He was sleeping, but his breathing was dangerously shallow.
Fat Cat hadn’t exaggerated. Kujovic was severely bloated, which meant his kidneys were failing. He’d also been charitable about his color. The ex-cop’s skin looked like an overripe banana, dirty yellow splotched with brown and trying to squeeze shut a pair of yellow-orange eyes. He wasn’t going to be the most popular guy on that transatlantic flight.
With two more large bodies in the room, there wasn’t any space left, so we stood shoulder to shoulder while he sat on his bed in a loose, batik caftan and a pair of paper slippers. “Nice fuckin’ outfit, huh? Back in the day, we took somebody down wearin’ one of these, we busted him up good.” He stared at me. “So what the fuck you want, since you ain’t no cop?”
He didn’t seem to want to talk about the 49ers’ draft picks, so I plowed in. “I’ve got dead friends, and the Chang murders might fit in. Anything you didn’t share?”
“Share? Like in if I write this down, motherfucker, you gonna keep me off the promotion list?”
“Somebody didn’t want them solved?”
“Let’s just say there was an incentive to leave it for the archaeologists.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Didn’t have nothin’ to do with what went down. Just the usual pussy shit upstairs.”
“So a guy adopts a couple of kids and gets killed for his trouble. Money issue?”
“Fucker was drivin’ a BMW 750. What’s that tell you?”
All it told me was maybe he had a big car payment. “They were shot, right?”
“One each. Forehead. Mr. and Mrs. belted in, the kids in car seats. A 9mm. Not neat, but something left to identify. Jesus Christ, ask the right fuckin’ questions, will ya?”
It’s a wonder more lawyers don’t shoot cops right on the stand. “It’s supposed to be a conversation asshole, why not save us both some time?”
Suddenly, he grunted in pain and hit himself in the chest. I guessed he was wearing a morphine injector. A few seconds later, he took a deep breath, and some of the hostility disappeared. “They were left in front of the guy’s parents’ house. Big joint. Private street.”
“So it was a message. We can get you anytime, anywhere.”
“Yeah, but not for the parents. The old man didn’t know his own name. Alzheimer’s. Totally gaga. Mom was all twisted up in a wheelchair.”
“The Chinese community isn’t known for its swagger. Raise your family, earn a living, keep your head down and your mouth shut. Want to be John Wayne, go live with the white people.”
“Keep going,” he said.
“You can do business with outsiders but don’t get mixed up with them.”
“And those two things, my friend, is why we’re discussing the late Mr. Chang. A bold motherfucker can make everybody a lot of money, but bold is like stupid, it never takes a day off.”
“He needed to be reminded with a bullet?”
“My guess is he got told half a dozen times, but his wife couldn’t conceive, and not many Chinese kids come on the market in this country. He sure as shit wasn’t gonna get a white one, so eventually he convinced himself that he was too valuable to fuck with. Grew up here. Never grasped the concept that some people don’t give a shit about money. There’s no question his brother, Randy, pulled the trigger. Prints were in the car, and he put one in his own ear a year later. Same weapon.”
“But you didn’t close the case.”
“My way of fuckin’ with the system.”
“That won’t fly, even with an archaeologist.”
We listened to him breathe for a while. No wonder he was angry. Worked his ass off for a career, and for his trouble, he was going to die eight thousand miles away, screaming.
“If I’m right, somebody had a gun on the brother while he did it.”
So there it was. The same crap you see from the Middle East to Middle Earth. And as far as the authorities are concerned, once the bodies are in the ground, if nobody’s marching outside, let it collect some dust, then send it to archives. Whatever you do, don’t scratch around and find out something you don’t want to know ... get mixed up in cultural or political shit none of us understand.
But two Chinese kids shouldn’t have meant four people had to die—no matter how they got here; I didn’t really want to hear the answer to my next question, but it had to be asked. “I’m still missing who sent the message.”
He waited so long, I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“Some of the street thugs up here don’t work for the godfathers.”
It was what I was afraid of. “Beijing,” I said.
“On the surface, what they do looks like ordinary bullshit. Extortion, arson, kidnappin’. But it’s actually intimidation. Keep the expats in line. Break the faces of the natural-borns who might have ideas. Problem is Wang the Tailor can buy from the right suppliers, kick back to the right tong and vote the way he’s told, but one day, somebody sees him having lunch with Ling the Silk Merchant, who Wang thinks is just another businessman. Only Ling’s a mover in Free Tibet, or his nephew’s a general in Taipei. If Wang’s lucky, all that happens is they cut off his wife’s tit.
“The day those Communist motherfuckers take over that shitty little island next door, there’s gonna be a bloodbath in a hundred Chinatowns. Lots of names on lots of lists. State department oughta open an embassy on Grant Avenue. They’d make more progress.
He was right. The American melting pot cracked when we decided not to mandate English as our official language. That was in 1795. It’s not about commerce or thought control or waging war on other cultures. It’s about unifying a population under the same set of laws. Multilingual is fine. Uni-lingual isn’t, unless it’s the one we adjudicate in. Otherwise, there will always be communities whose only connection to the rest of us is the weather. And because the politicians just care about votes, the people who need the law most can’t even call a cop.
Carroll Rackmann had stuck a thumb in the eye of the Chinese government and kept twisting. They didn’t care about babies, but they did care about control—and about being embarrassed. And what could be more embarrassing than watching little kids they were going to kill or let die be raised in freedom and with means.
Each time a new one arrived, it was like putting up a billboard in a thousand villages. And the bosses in Beijing didn’t count it as one lost out of multitudes but as a bullet fired on their sovereignty—and their dignity. Most Westerners can’t comprehend the concept of face, but Rackmann did, and as much as he wanted to save children, he was just as interested in waging war. As it turned out, he was better at it than all the uniforms and all the spooks in Washington. It was hard not to be impressed, but I wished I’d never had to know. And I dreaded what I didn’t.
“If killing the Changs was to make a point to the locals, why schlep all the way to Victorville?”
“Easy answer. A few days away from the desk. Nice per diem and some new ass to chase. We laughed all the way down.”
For the first time, I smiled. “Victorville? Ass?”
“You’d be surprised. Couple of guys had been there before.”
I stopped smiling. “Before? What for?”
“There’s a famous cop who lives down that way. LAPD. Got some big-time friends up and down the coast. People who like to get together on his birthday.”
“Chuck Brando.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Fabian Cañada.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Never met the guy, just heard that if a cop’s in a jam, he’s the man to see. Unless you need a miracle. Then you go to Serbia.”
So Kujovic wasn’t going home to die. He was taking one last chance. The Sacred Water of the Caves. How he intended to get to one of the most remote places in Europe in his condition was anybody’s guess. “Black River Monastery,” I said.
He looked at me like I’d slapped him. I’d intruded. This was between him and God. “None of my business,” I said, and quickly changed the subject. “When you were banging around in Victorville, did you happen to run into somebody named Crowe? If he was a cop then, he would have been a greenhorn.”
“Never heard of him, but it wasn’t my town.”
“Who told you about this Fabian Cañada?”
“Vic Innunzio. He knew every cop and every piece of ass from Seattle to Tucson. But Vic’s waitin’ for the Rapture out at Our Lady of the Worms, so you ain’t gonna get much out of him. For all I know, Cañada’s dead too. He was supposed to be old back then.” He held my eyes for a long time like he was waiting for something. “You want to tell me why you haven’t asked about the others?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Fat Cat stepped in. “First thing I did after you called was have my cousin hump over to the Chronicle and pull the Chang obit. Wasn’t there, at least not where you said.”
“I’m not following.”
“Somebody gave you bogus info, my man. The Changs were killed several years earlier. During the Chinatown Massacres.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Neither had the Chronicle. Or the New York Times, the London Daily Mail, the Sydney Morning Herald or anybody else. Just this guy.”
I looked at Kujovic. “What constitutes a massacre?”
“If you take the sixteen we had here in those two weeks and multiply by the number of major cities with Chinatowns, five hundred give or take. Factor in a few others, adjust for collateral damage, could be twice that. No way to know for sure.”
“Two weeks?”
“Sixteen days, to be exact. Same as the murders. To the Chinese, eight’s a lucky number, so they like to work with multiples. Tiananmen Square minus sixteen.”
It hit me like a falling safe. How had I missed it? Tiananmen Square was the Kennedy and King Assassinations, the Oklahoma City Bombing and 9/11 all rolled into one. The single, unifying event in the national consciousness of more than a billion Chinese. Every person from the tiniest hamlet to Shanghai could tell you exactly what he was doing at the precise moment he heard about it. Right down to the fear he felt.
“You said minus sixteen. If it was retribution, you mean plus.”
“I might look like Jabba the Fuckin’ Hut, but I ain’t out to lunch. I said minus, because I meant minus. Sixteen murders in the sixteen days before Tiananmen.”
I was rocked again. This was Department 11 territory, only there hadn’t been a Department 11 then. “So Beijing knew it was coming and tried to prevent it.”
“Maybe. More likely, they knew they couldn’t, so they were making sure it didn’t have legs. And have you seen any? How about them fuckin’ Olympics, huh?”
“Kill the activists. Watch the sheep run back to their pens. And for good luck, round up to a multiple of eight.”
“Things got a little dicey a couple of places, but there wasn’t any Shah of Iran or South Africa shit. Whole world eatin’ their ass to make a change. I ain’t no Nostradamus, but seven months later, the Berlin Wall came down. Ask me, it was part of a package. First Asia, then Europe. Bye-bye Big Commies.”
“Instead, they ended up a superpower.”
“God loves a good laugh.”
“Earlier, you talked about a future bloodbath. So that would be the second.”
“That we know of. Lotta years since those fuckers took over.”
An old state department hand once told me how they used to manipulate the press into chasing bullshit so they could hide what was really going on. But this was too big, cut across too many lines. “How is it this goes unreported, but you know?”
“That’s two questions. First, when it comes to Chinatown—any Chinatown—unless something goes down where an outsider sees it—like four dead Changs in a nice neighborhood—if the community holds its water, it didn’t happen.”
“And the second part?”
He looked past us for a moment, remembering something. “My partner was from over there. Sam Martin—name’s a long story. His sister, Glenda, was a leader in the Defiance— that’s what it was called. Sam and I were the ones who found her—what was left of her anyway.”
Martin? “Any relation to Major Martin?”
There wasn’t much elasticity left in those puffy eyes, but what there was opened all the way. “Who the fuck are you?”
He wasn’t going to buy that it was just a shot in the dark, so I went the other way. “He’s probably going to be joining bo
th of them. Another brother too. I’m pretty sure there’s a connection to what you just told me, but I don’t know what it is yet.”
“But it’s on the wrong side.”
I nodded.
“So how soon’s this Major thing gonna happen?”
“Maybe ahead of you.”
He seemed to like that. “Families. Glad I missed the boat.”
“Somebody once told me that we hate the ones we love because they deserve it.”