Mike must have been to the main house earlier and returned with a pot of coffee. I poured him a second cup and a first for me, while he worked his Google app.
“Did Chidra Persaud mention anything about a grand slam?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No baseball. All hunting all the time.”
“I’m talking hunting.”
“What’s the grand slam, then?”
“There are apparently four kinds of wild sheep in North America,” Mike said.
“Yeah. She told us that much.”
“Your pal Horace is just one of them.”
“Where are the others?”
“Desert bighorn in the Southwest,” he said. “Something called Dall’s in Alaska and British Columbia, and Stone’s sheep in the Yukon.”
“How does that connect to Chidra Persaud?” I said.
“I’m working on that,” Mike said. “You were right about the state auctions for sheep tags, Coop. You led me straight to it.”
“To what?”
“There’s a sheep-hunting competition called the Grand Slam,” Mike said. “To win, you have to bag all four species. Your ram gets weighed and measured in the judging, and they count the rings on its horns to see how old he was. High stakes, big money, real prizes.”
“Spare me the part about how these sportsmen are doing so much for conservation, will you?”
“You got it,” Mike said. “So four tags were auctioned in Montana this past January. I’ve been up half the night checking out the winners on Facebook. I think I’ve identified the man who Battaglia was planning to take with him to Chidra’s lodge on November first. He’s already bragging about it online.”
“What’s his name?” I said, grabbing at the corner of Mike’s iPad to turn it around so that I could see the shooter for myself.
“Pedro Echevarria. Ever see him before?”
I looked at his face but didn’t recognize him. “No, but he doesn’t look like a ghost. Or a Ghost Shadow.”
“Are you disappointed that it’s not George Kwan?” Mike asked.
“Got to go where the evidence leads you,” I said.
Echevarria didn’t appear to be more than thirty years old. He was brown-skinned, with dark curly hair, light eyes, and a long scar that ran from his left ear down to his chin. He had posted a photo of himself kneeling behind a dead bighorn, somewhere out west, holding up its head to display his trophy.
“Born in the Bronx,” Mike said. “Owns a pad in SoHo now.”
“Must have made it large. Those tags cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” I said. “Add a few million for a loft in SoHo.”
“Comebacks are a beautiful thing, Coop. I called in a record check an hour ago,” Mike said. “Seems Pedro had a felony conviction for drugs. Glad to see he’s turned his life around. Just likes to kill for sport now.”
“Possession?” I asked.
“Sale,” Mike said. “Sale of cocaine to an undercover. Three buys caught on tape before they locked him up.”
“I’ll say this is a comeback. How old is he?”
“Thirty-two. He was only eighteen when he was nailed for it. Did the minimum before he was paroled.”
“How in hell does a parolee like Echevarria get the money to enter an auction where bids can run as high as half a million dollars?” I asked. “You’d think he was back in the dope-selling biz to be running in the same leagues with entrepreneurs and the oil royals.”
“You’ve got such a suspicious mind, kid. What if I told you he’s got a sponsor?” Mike said. “Maybe Pedro pulled straight, with the help of someone paying his bills.”
“There’s something I just love about mentoring. And I’m always so happy when the Department of Corrections actually corrects someone,” I said. “It’s such a rare phenomenon.”
“I second the notion.”
“Who’s his guardian angel?”
“According to the website of the Grand Slam Club, Pedro’s winning bid was underwritten by Kwan Enterprises,” Mike said.
“George Kwan,” I said, confident that Paul Battaglia thought what he had seen on television Monday night was me leaning in to talk to Kwan during the Met’s fashion show. “We’re back to him again. The apparition himself.”
“Ready to ride?” Mike asked.
“Totally,” I said. “Have you got wheels?”
“Yeah, the lieutenant gave me a loaner since the old one went up in flames.”
“Where are we going?”
“To George Kwan’s house, Coop,” he said. “Only this time we’re getting in.”
FORTY
“May I help you?” A petite Asian woman answered the door at the double-wide town house on East Seventy-Eighth Street. She was wearing a black maid’s uniform with a white apron.
“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m here to see Mr. Kwan.”
“Too early,” she said. “Mr. Kwan isn’t available. No appointments on Sunday.”
“He’ll see me, I’m sure. Tell him my name is Alexandra Cooper. He’ll remember,” I said. “He just talked to me on Wednesday.”
The woman tried to close the wrought iron gate but she was no match for Mike. He had been standing off to the side, to my left, when the housekeeper looked through the peephole and opened the door to me. Now he reached out his arm and forced his way in.
It was eight thirty on Sunday morning. I didn’t think there was ever a time Kwan was without a bodyguard, but perhaps we had been lucky in the moment.
Mike kept going, his footsteps ringing as he charged forward on the black-and-white floor—painted like a large checkerboard—as though he knew where he was headed.
I tried to catch up to him but was brought up short by a tall man—broad shouldered and barrel-chested—who appeared in the hallway from a room on the left. He was holding a white linen napkin in one hand, as though we had interrupted his breakfast.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Mike turned and held his ground. “Don’t lay a hand on her.”
“Who the fuck are you?” the man said.
“Mike Chapman—NYPD. That’s Alex Cooper, from the DA’s office.”
There was a gun holstered on the man’s shoulder. I was relieved that he hadn’t reached for it, and that Mike hadn’t felt the need to go for his own.
“What do you want?”
“George Kwan,” Mike said. “I want to talk to him.”
“He’s not here.”
“The housekeeper told me otherwise,” Mike said.
The tall man looked around for her, but she had disappeared from the hallway.
I could hear classical music playing from a speaker in a room off the hallway, close to where Mike was standing. He backed up a few steps and put his hand on the doorknob.
“Don’t go in, Chapman. It’s not polite,” the tall man said.
“Etiquette’s not my strong suit, Miss Manners,” Mike said. “We won’t be long.”
Mike opened the door and I heard someone—presumably George Kwan—shout his guard’s name: “Rudy!”
Rudy ran down the rest of the hallway but Mike was already in the room. I followed.
George Kwan was sitting at a desk, dressed in a burgundy silk jacquard smoking jacket over striped pajamas. The day’s newspapers were spread out on the desktop in front of him.
“You’re dismissed, Rudy,” Kwan said. From the look on his face, he might have been talking about a permanent dismissal.
Kwan got to his feet and bowed his head in our direction.
“Impatient, aren’t you? I told you to call for an appointment and I’d be happy to see you,” he said, retying the belt on his jacket. “Now that you’re in, why don’t you have a seat.”
I tried not to smile, remembering one of Mike’s favorite investigative tips. If you could interview a m
an who was still in pajamas, you had the upper hand. He would always feel somewhat naked sitting opposite his interrogators. A woman in lingerie, however, presented a more difficult challenge.
Kwan was taller than Mike, lean and fit-looking. He was in his midforties.
We sat in chairs opposite him, and he reseated himself at his desk.
“You’re looking well, Ms. Cooper,” he said. “There was a suggestion in one of the tabloids that you’d suffered an accident since I last saw you.”
“I appreciate your concern. I’m just fine, so you might have me confused with someone else,” I said. “I’ve been out of town for a while.”
“And you, Detective Chapman,” Kwan said. “Are you working overtime? Sunday morning, so early? What brings you here? The endless saga of Wolf Savage?”
Mike was right about Kwan’s comfort level. He kept fussing with the lapel of his smoking jacket and adjusting the knot of his belt.
“Yeah, but the plot has kind of thickened since the other day, Mr. Kwan.”
The man rested his forearms on the desk. “In what way?”
“Well, let’s start with your relationship with Paul Battaglia.”
“I’d hardly call it a relationship,” Kwan said. “We were acquaintances, as I told you.”
“Then I suppose Battaglia just stopped by to get your signature on his petition,” Mike said.
“Petition? You’re not making sense, Detective.”
“You know,” Mike said, “the way politicians go door to door, collecting signatures of registered voters to get on the ballot.”
“I signed nothing.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Mike said, leaning in the moment the fumbling started again. “I was being facetious. But we know that Paul Battaglia was here with you the week before last. Ms. Cooper and I saw him walk out your front door.”
George Kwan shifted his eyes to look at me.
“We’re not fucking with you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said. “Why was the district attorney paying you a visit?”
“Look, Chapman. I’ve got a lot on my mind. It must have been about the Savage murder. It must have been to tell me your department had identified the killer,” Kwan said. “He knew my company was trying to buy a piece of Savage.”
“Battaglia was swift, but he didn’t have a crystal ball, Mr. Kwan. For all we knew at the time the DA left this building, you could have been the killer,” Mike said. “We didn’t have half the answers on that particular afternoon.”
“Then I’m mistaken,” Kwan said.
“Press the redo button and start over.”
“Start where?”
“Where do you live, Mr. Kwan?” I asked. “What’s your home base? Is it in China?”
“Right here, Ms. Cooper. I was born and raised in New York. This is my home.”
I was surprised by that information. I knew that Kwan Enterprises was headquartered abroad. We’d learned that during the Savage investigation.
“I didn’t know you were American,” I said. “Perhaps it’s the accent that fooled me.”
“A British secondary school in Hong Kong,” Kwan said. “But I lived on Pell Street, just a couple of blocks behind your office, for most of my young life.”
Mike jumped on that fact. “Isn’t it your father, in Hong Kong, who runs the business?”
“You’ve done some of your homework, Mr. Chapman, but not all.”
“What did I miss?”
“My father was the black sheep of the family,” Kwan said. “He ran away from home—first to Los Angeles, and then east to New York, where I was born. When I was a kid, I could stand on the fire escape of our fourth-floor walk-up on Pell; I could see Paul Battaglia’s office—you know, Ms. Cooper, that huge corner office he has.”
“I know it well,” I said. “When were you last there?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, just like I expect you’re both doing,” Kwan said. “I never mentioned being in his office. But growing up on the mean streets of Chinatown in those days, all the parents used to point to that bay of windows and tell us the district attorney was waiting for us there. Kind of like the bogeyman in fairy tales.”
“Why did they threaten you?” Mike asked. “Were you a gang kid?”
Mike was going straight for the Ghost Shadows.
“The gangs were everywhere in the ’hood,” Kwan said, reaching for a cigarette. “Smoke, either of you?”
We both declined, but the cigarette holder and Dunhill lighter were two more signs of Kwan’s seemingly elegant affectations.
“You either joined one by the time you were twelve, Detective, or you would likely not have survived to become an adult.”
“So you did?”
“My mother wasn’t Asian, Chapman. She didn’t get the whole picture.”
“American?”
“Latina, from Mexico. My father met her in LA,” Kwan said. “What my mother didn’t understand was that the gangs in Chinatown were just following the traditions of ethnic crime groups that had come before them.”
Kwan inhaled, held the smoke, and blew it out slowly.
“They attacked their own before they even thought of branching out into other areas of the city, into other neighborhoods. So we were all in the danger zone—sign up to play, or become vulnerable to their reach.”
“Was your father involved?” I asked.
“You can’t really blame him,” Kwan said. “He was trying to make his own way in a country that wasn’t very friendly to immigrants who didn’t speak the language.”
“Friendlier than now, I’d bet,” Mike said.
“I’ll give you that, Detective.”
“What did he do?”
George Kwan was fidgeting with his smoking jacket again, now adjusting the cuffs. “Every ethnic group had gangs that staked out their turf,” he said. “That’s the history of mob activity in America. During Prohibition, the Jews—like Arnold Rothstein—took over smuggling liquor all over the country.”
“Narcotics too,” Mike said.
“The Mafia was next to find a way to infiltrate legitimate businesses and take over control,” Kwan said. “Construction, trucking, garbage.”
“Before they got into narcotics,” Mike said, beating the same drum.
“They denied it for a long time,” Kwan said, “but then there were the Pizza Connection convictions, in the late eighties.”
That Southern District trial was still the longest in federal prosecution history . . . more than a dozen mobsters found guilty of importing heroin and laundering the money to send back to Sicily, using pizza joints as fronts for trafficking around the metropolitan area.
“And Asians?” Mike asked.
“We always had the gambling dens in our own backyard,” Kwan said. “That’s how it started. Street gang against street gang, Chinese against Chinese neighbor, figuring to go mainstream with bigger cash cows someday, once they were powerful enough.”
“Narcotics,” Mike said, again.
“Absolutely, Detective. It was the Green Dragons first, stepping out of our world and into major crimes,” Kwan said. “They’d had enough of extorting their own people—that was petty cash to them—so they went after the drug business, citywide.”
There was a point in time, in the 1990s, that Chinese gangs controlled two-thirds of New York’s heroin-smuggling business. Even before my prosecutorial career, the newspapers had made that fact plain.
“Was your family involved?” Mike asked.
Kwan put his head back and blew smoke in the air. “I know you’ll check out everything I say, Detective—although there are probably more Kwans in the NYPD record files than there are Smiths—so, yes, some of them were involved.”
Mike glanced at me.
“My father was recruited by the Green Dragons,” Kwan said. “I wasn�
�t even ten years old at the time, so I don’t remember much. Except I have a pretty vivid recollection of the first time I saw him with a gun.”
“I imagine that’s hard to forget,” I said.
“My mother left, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “That was devastating to me. It was more than the gun, of course; it was my father’s transition to racketeering and to murder, but to me it was always symbolized by the gun.”
“Where did she go?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I only saw her once again after that day.”
“When was that?” Mike asked.
“You were too young to be a cop back then, so perhaps you don’t know what the situation was,” Kwan said. “The only mistake an Asian gang member could make in those days was to victimize someone who wasn’t one of us. To kill a Caucasian, Detective. To kill a white man.”
Kwan stared at me to make sure I was listening.
“That’s the only time the police ever came after any of us,” he said.
Mike held his tongue. He knew his own father’s integrity. He knew Kwan wasn’t right.
“Your father killed someone?” I asked.
“That’s unclear, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “He was part of a group of Green Dragons who kidnapped several rival gang members—”
“Which gang?” Mike asked.
“The Ghost Shadows, Detective, if that means anything to you.”
Mike’s expression didn’t change.
“There was a shootout in a Chinese restaurant in Queens,” Kwan said. “The Ghosts came looking for revenge, but in too public a place. They sprayed the front of the restaurant with gunfire, killing six or seven people inside. One of the dead men was simply picking up takeout for his family on a Thursday night. A white man.”
“That brought the NYPD down on the Dragons and the Ghost Shadows, I guess,” I said. “Did your father get caught up in the police action?”
“He didn’t, Ms. Cooper,” Kwan said. “But that’s only because he was one of the other people left on the restaurant floor. Ko-Lin Kwan—my father—didn’t get quite the investigative attention the white man’s murder did, but he was every bit as dead.”
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