“The driver ever tell her his name?”
She shakes her head. “She prob’ly mentioned it, but I can’t remember.”
“That could be real important, Monique. Think about it some more.”
A hurt expression. “I’ve already thought about it. I hear a lot of men’s names, like twenty a day sometimes, and most of ’em are bullshit ones men make up. His name just didn’t mean nothin’ to me at the time.”
“All right, you said he became a regular, so what did she say to you when he’d call her after that first night? Who would she say had called her?”
She shrugs, “The old man. She’d just say the old man wanted her over again, talkin’ about the customer.”
“Because the customer was old.”
“Right.”
“Where did the driver take her?”
“An apartment in Beverly Hills, off Santa Monica.”
“You don’t remember the street?”
“My girl never said. She was all Compton, you know, through ’n’ through, and was just startin’ to make it around to other parts of town. It was a nice ’hood was all she said, a nice apartment—big, you know?”
“She tell you what kind of car the driver had?”
“She mentioned it but I don’t remember much about it. I’m pretty sure she said it was big, like a Cadillac or Continental, like that. Maybe a dark one—yeah, she definitely said it was dark.”
“A limousine?”
“No, not one of those. Sonita would’a made more noise about a limo.”
“What did she tell you about the customer, the old man?”
“She didn’t talk much about how he looked, ’cause she said there wasn’t nothin’ good to talk about. She just said he was old and skinny with, uh, well”—an it is what it is shrug—“a little dick.”
Jesus.
“She didn’t talk about his hair, how tall he was, anything?”
She shakes her head.
“Did she give you any idea how old he was?”
Perplexed by the question, she says, “Old, you know.”
“Sixty, seventy, eighty?”
“Right.”
Jesus Christ.
I shouldn’t be so hard on her. Teen witnesses have a poor perception of age. To a nineteen-year-old, fifty is old, eighty unimaginable.
She says, “What she talked about was how he could talk. He liked to talk—mostly bullshit, you know, funny stuff.”
“Did he tell her what his name was?”
She smiles. “Sunny said he gave hisself a different name every time they were together—as a joke, you know?”
“What kind of names?”
She shrugs. “I ain’t so good with names—right?—but the ones he told her were funny, like names from the movies, she said. She said he made her laugh over funny bullshit like that all the time, even while they was, uh, doin’ it. After they did it, she said they’d just hang around his big old room and watch TV. She really ’n’ truly liked bein’ with that old man. He must’ve liked her, too, ’cause he sent the driver over most every day from that night on.”
“Did she usually stay all night?”
“Most of the night, yeah. She made a lot more cash off him than I did with all my men put together—a lot more—and she didn’t work half as hard as me to get it.” Her cigarette had burned down to the filter as she talked, and she reaches forward and tosses it in the ashtray, leans back, crosses her arms as if hugging herself. “And he paid her for a lot more than fuckin’ and hangin’ with him, too,” she says, and looks dead at me.
“What else?”
She takes a deep breath and works her mouth, as if building up her courage. “You can’t tell nobody I said this—promise?”
“Nobody?”
“Right.”
Jesus, I think as I look away, running my hand through my hair. My promises of confidentiality are making her useless as a witness, but bottom line is I’d promise her almost anything to keep the info flowing. I sigh and say, “All right, I promise.”
“Did you know Khang was into drugs?”
Oh, that. “I’ve heard the rumors.”
“It’s true. He’d hit me if he knew I told you that, maybe kill me, but it’s true.”
“And you know it’s true because…”
“ ’Cause one of the boys that worked in the warehouse of his company told Sunny, and showed her a box of horse that had just come in from Cambodia. She said they snuck it in by sewing it in the lining of clothes—coats and jackets, he said, and they sealed it inside the soles of tenny shoes, too, and the soles of other types of shoes. That was one of the boy’s jobs, takin’ all that stuff apart and cuttin’ and baggin’ the H for sale.” She hesitates a beat. “He even gave her a little of what he’d skimmed.”
“Did she use it?”
“We did, yeah…We snorted it.” She shakes her head, says, “That was wicked shit,” then snaps me a worried look. “Don’t tell my dad that, okay?”
“All right, that’s another one just between me and you. Now, tell me what Khang’s business has to do with this customer giving Sonita money.”
“This boy, he’s Cambodian, him and Sonita had a thing goin’, a sexual thing. He told Sunny all kinds of stuff. Just before she took off with me he told her that they had this big shipment comin’ in, and they were going to take it all to this place over by the Pueblo Del Rio projects to cut and rebag it. He said it like he was braggin’, ’cause he said it was the biggest load they’d ever got, and he was goin’ to make a lot of coin cuttin’ ’n’ baggin’ it. Enough money to last him a year, he said.”
“What does this have to do with Sonita’s customer?”
She looks away, her eyes searching as if she lost her way in the story, and it takes a few seconds for her face to return to normal. She finally says, “Oh, yeah, see, Sonita was mad at Khang when she left, right? For hittin’ her, right? And she liked this old man, the customer, and they got to talkin’ one night and Sonita told him about it.”
“She told the old man about the shipment?”
“Yeah. She said she was drunk and high and got to talkin’ about Khang, about him bein’ her uncle and how she hated him, and she told the old man about his drug business and that led to the other thing—right?—this big load. And the old man really perked up about it and gave her a extra thousand bucks before she left. He told her if she ever had anything else like that to tell him, he’d pay her the same thing.”
“She have any idea what he was going to do with this information?”
She nods. “He said he was a cop, or used to be; he was, like, retired. He said he was a big-shot cop, though, before he quit.”
I don’t buy that. Not that I think a retired cop would be above frolicking with a prostitute or be stupid enough to tell her he’s a retired cop—far from it. No, I just don’t think there’s a retired cop in this town who has the spare coin to pay Sonita as well and often as this guy did, plus pay a driver to shuttle her back and forth 24/7.
“What else did she say about this place by Pueblo Del Rio, where they were taking this shipment?”
She scrunches her eyebrows to think about it. “Her boyfriend said it was a plumbin’ business, that they always drive the dope in ’n’ out over there in plumbin’ trucks. He said they cut ’n’ bag it in, like, a big garage or somethin’.”
“Did she tell you what street this place is on?”
She thinks some more. “A street with a number.”
“Is that all you remember about it?”
She shakes her head. “The dope was comin’ in this week sometime.”
“You specifically remember the shipment’s coming in this week.”
“Yeah, tomorrow, I think. I remember ’cause my birthday’s this weekend, and it was supposed to happen right before then.”
“Ah,” I say. “Happy birthday in advance.”
She smiles.
Nodding, I begin to think I’ve run out of questions when another
big one occurs to me. “Do you have Sonita’s phone number?”
“Yeah,” she says, and reels it off. “Why do you need that?”
Tapping it into my phone, I say, “To contact the phone company and get a list of the phone calls and texts she made and received. We might be able to track down the driver by getting our hands on his phone number.”
She looks down at her nails, recrosses her legs, looks up at me and says, “You can find out that stuff by just lookin’ at her phone.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yeah,” she says as she reaches in her purse. “Here,” she says, and hands over a midgrade Samsung with a full screen. “Sunny was so drunk and stoned when she left that night, she forgot it. She forgot her phone a lot when she got that way.”
I power up the phone.
The password window appears and I ask Monique if she knows Sonita’s PIN.
“Yeah, four sevens—we used each other’s phones all the time.”
“Easy enough.” I punch in the PIN and when the live screen appears, Monique says her phone’s identical to Sonita’s and offers to help me navigate to the call list. I accept her offer and move from my seat to sit next to her. We scroll through the list for under a minute before finding the number of the driver who was to pick up Sonita the night she died. It was listed as first received around ten that night and at least once a day the preceding twelve days, always about an hour before the driver was to arrive. It didn’t appear on the call list again after Sonita left Monique the last time.
I’m tingling with anticipation as I dial the driver’s number from my personal cell, but Monique sends me crashing to earth when she says, “The number’s been disconnected, probably yesterday.”
Numb, my phone hand falls in my lap. “You’ve called it.”
“Twice, the last time yesterday. First time I did it was the night Sunny left and didn’t come back.”
“Did anyone answer then?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
Now I’m empty. “That’s all I can think of, Monique. If I need you for anything else, how can I reach you?”
“You won’t be able to. I’m tossin’ this phone after you leave, and you can bet your fine ass you won’t see me again.”
She’s splitting town.
Can’t say I blame her.
Leo
Driving north on Alameda toward downtown, I call Abel. He listens intently while I report on my interview of Monique. The focus of our conversation is the mystery driver’s cellphone number. He says he’ll have somebody do the paperwork on the subpoenas ASAP and have them served on the five phone companies in town. With any luck, the number will be linked to a named account and we can have the driver in custody before the end of the evening. Before I can say much at all about the driver’s supposed boss—who Monique referred to as “the old man”—Abel curtly orders me to light a fire under my hunt for Vann Phan, one of Oliver’s two cellies last night.
“Forget the other kid, Peng Vannak,” he says. “I just got word from Northeast that a rent-a-cop found his body in an old Nissan ditched in Glassell Park.”
I emit a low whistle. “The plot thickens.”
“It does indeed. If Phan’s alive when you find him, you might want to tell him what happened to his buddy so he knows what fate’s in store for him. He was tortured with a blow torch.”
“Damn, how cliché.”
“But effective. Withhold further comment until you see the pictures. I’ll email them.”
“Sounds like somebody was looking for information.”
“And that somebody probably got what they were looking for. They cut his throat, and the coroner said that was the cause of death. My guess is he finally squealed, and his torturers cut him to put him out of his misery.”
A classic OLB hit, one that sends the community a stark message.
For many reasons, Khang comes to mind as a possible suspect. I say nothing because I don’t have to; Abel’s thinking the same thing.
Until now I’ve been debating whether to keep the promise of confidentiality I made to Monique regarding Khang’s drug trafficking, especially what Sonita disclosed to “the old man” regarding Khang’s drug shipment. Now that we’ve found Vannak’s corpse charred and filleted, the decision is an easy one: to spare Monique a similar fate, I don’t volunteer a word of it.
—
Vann Phan lives in the Pueblo Del Rio housing project in Building 22 on Fifty-Second Street, just three buildings from the corner at Holmes. Public housing, rows and rows of green roof over yellow stucco, half-naked kids dancing through courtyards strung with clothesline, almost all Southeast Asians. I curb park my unmarked on Fifty-Second within sight of Building 22. As I cross the street, an ancient Vietnemese male gives me the stink eye while stooped like he’s taking a shit on a bare patch of ground next to a building. He’s wearing grimy shorts and tank top, puffing a spliff and stroking his Ho Chi Minh beard, his eyes shiny and distant. “Hey you, cop,” he says as I walk by, his voice quick, clipped. “What kind’a gun you got, huh, what kind?”
I ignore him as I walk by.
“Hey, you doan wanna talk’ta me, huh? Fuck you, uh? Fuck you…”
Old tires are piled on what passes as Phan’s porch, along with a rusted tricycle that has a rear wheel missing, and an upended charcoal grill. The inside door is open. I peek through the screen and see someone resembling Phan on the couch, so I say, “Police,” push open the screen door and stride into the living room.
A tidal wave of stench propels me backward: urine, feces, bug spray, burnt peanut oil, rotten fish, crack smoke. Dirty clothes and beer cans are strewn across the living room, crumpled Jenny Mai’s carryout bags, Burger King sacks, ashtrays overflowing with butts. A black-and-white mongrel terrier trots from the back hallway, squats briefly, then yap-yap-yaps and sprints for the door, leaving a fresh pile of turds in its wake.
My eyes rivet on Phan, who’s zoned out on the couch, no shirt, his eyes black marbles. Maybe he’s a little bigger than a thoroughbred jockey, but not much, and the fucker’s as straight and hard as a tungsten nail. His waist-long hair is braided in intricate rows, he’s inked head to toe—E/S OB tatts, dragon tatts, Khmer script tatts—and there’s a ceremonial three-dot cigarette burn on the back of his right hand, a five dot on the left. He comes to life when he sees me and thrusts his right hand behind him into the couch cushion.
The fucker’s an OB, and OBs, like their Lazy Boyz predecessors, kill cops for happy hour entertainment. So I take two quick strides and strike downward to bury my right fist into his solar plexus.
He emits no cries, no moans, just an oomph and a whoosh of breath that hits my face so flush I smell what he had for lunch—noodles and fish sauce, heavy on garlic and onions.
Disabled now, he’s easy to push to his side. I reach behind me for my cuffs. Dangling them before his strained eyes, I say, “Phan, for my protection I’m going to cuff you and search the apartment. Do you have any problem with me doing this?”
His lungs wheeze like a busted accordion.
“I figured you’d consent,” I say, and cuff his left wrist, flip him on the couch, snatch his right hand, and cuff his hands behind his back. I roll him on the floor faceup, cuff his bare ankles. I pat down every crevice and pocket of his cargo shorts, finding nothing. Considering he just caught a wicked gut punch, he’s keeping his shit together admirably. You can tell he’s wound tight, though, so fuckin’ tight his body hums like a tuning fork. He’s catching his breath now and won’t look at me, won’t acknowledge my existence.
Might as well toss the apartment until he’s recovered enough to talk. First I rifle the couch: a cheap .25 semiauto is underneath the cushion, which I stuff in my pocket. Now for the bedroom, a room more wrecked than any other in the place. Nothing in here but a baggie containing a small quantity of meth and weed on the nightstand, along with a bong and two small glass pipes, all three warm and smelly—used within the last few minutes.
N
othing of note in the closet, either, and I dig through one, two drawers in the chest when, Abracadabra, and thank you, Jesus, in the third one I find a roll of cash rolled tightly in a thick rubber band. I snap off the band, riffle the wad and discover that the bills all appear to be Bennie Franks—fifty, sixty, shit, probably a hundred of them. Ten grand would be my guess. Could be drug proceeds, but to me the count is too rounded off for that. More like the average hit fee for your run-of-the-mill faked jailhouse suicide.
I reband the wad and stuff it in my pocket.
What’s Phan gonna do, file a complaint and demand a return of his hit fee?
Into the bathroom, where there’s only one place to look, the toilet tank: nothing.
I stick my head in the kitchen and the collage of squalor prevents me from walking in. Fuck searching in here. It’s not worth contracting an incurable disease.
Stroll back into the living room.
Phan, shit, what a character. The scrappy little fucker has made it to his feet and is bunny-hopping to the door.
You gotta love this kid.
“Good try, Phan.” I grab his braids from behind, yank him backward, and catch him before he falls. He’s as light as a Bruce Lee action figure, and I take him by the shoulders and set him upright on the couch. He tries to kick me, but I block his cuffed feet with my knee and slap him hard on top of the head. “Behave, damn it, and I’ll treat you like a man.”
He’s still suckin’ wind, but no longer struggling for it, and he focuses those two black marbles in his skull at the dead TV screen.
I sit on the couch to his right and the springs are so worn my ass almost sinks to the floor. I push myself to the solid edge of the couch frame and turn to face him.
The pitch I prepared on the way over is made up almost entirely of theories, with a lot of lies thrown in to make it sound like we’ve got him cold. My read on him so far is he won’t buy a word of it. Even if he buys every word, he probably won’t talk to me until he’s properly motivated. To keep my conscience clear, I go at him legitimately first. “Phan, the guy who croaked in your cell last night, Taquan Oliver. I’m here investigating his murder—yeah, murder. We know he didn’t kill himself.”
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