by Mary Moylum
He leafed through Sun’s immigration file. It was frustrating how little information and few pages it contained. He had seen thicker files on family sponsorships. He skimmed through it again. Apart from the excessive foreign work authorizations, there wasn’t even enough evidence to get Sun on illegal immigration. Or drug dealing for that matter.
The Flying Dragons gang was involved in people smuggling. The question was, how to link Sun Sui to the Dragons, and to prove that he was an agent smuggler himself? Gee Tung gave oral evidence on that. But Dubois and Gee Tung’s lawyer were locked in a stalemate over Gee Tung repeating these statements in court. It was that damn witness protection program they were fighting over. Dubois’s promises of court testimony in exchange of federal witness protection were coming back to haunt them. Getting into the witness program was a matter for a law enforcement committee, and it was very doubtful that Gee Tung would fit their criteria for protection. You could maybe persuade one or two people to your way of thinking, but not an entire room. He was partly relieved to hear that Gee Tung hadn’t made the cut into the witness protection program. After all, the snakehead was caught committing federal offences and participated in Walter’s death. Why should he get away with all that simply by giving testimony? And what if his testimony failed to indict and deport?
Hold that thought. A ripple of anger washed through his body. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then he forced his thoughts into order. Build a case on circumstantial evidence. Did he have enough? No, it wasn’t a question of enough. It was a case of consistent circumstantial evidence. And consistent was the operative word.
He pondered all of these questions and issues down the steps to the subway station. As he got into a halfempty car, a plan was beginning to take shape in his mind. The more he thought about the sex-slavery angle, the more he liked his idea. Bottom line, he wanted Walter Martin’s killer, alive or dead. From past experience, he knew better than most that there was more than one way to skin a cat.
Grace sucked in her breath. She needed a moment to regain her composure. Mark Crosby was dead. What the hell had she gotten herself into? In hindsight, Grace knew she should not have agreed to second-chair the agent smuggler case. Her other mistake was to walk into Crosby’s house. Yes, that was her biggest mistake.
André Dubois and his team of RCMP officers, a forensics team, detectives from homicide and selected members of the press were traipsing through Crosby’s house, while Grace sat outside in a police cruiser answering the same questions over and over again.
A crowd of curious bystanders stared from beyond the yellow police tapes discussing who the killer could be as they watched the medical examiner pull up with an ambulance to take the black body bag to the morgue. After a while the homicide detectives took her back inside the house, where they grilled her some more.
Grace sat at Mark’s kitchen table watching the forensics team down on their hands and knees looking for DNA evidence of the perpetrators and other clues.
They wanted to know about her relationship with Mark Crosby. The reason for her visit. Was it her first time in his house? Did she notice anything out of the ordinary? Then she was forced to reconstruct everything, moment by moment, from her arrival at his house to the moment when the police got there.
Dubois pulled up a chair across from her. “Let’s go over it one more time.”
Grace groaned.
“You saw no one when you came in.”
“That’s right.”
“How did you get into the house?”
“The door was partially open but I rang the bell anyway. When there was no answer, I simply walked in.”
“And what did you see?”
“His suitcase was in the hallway. I called Mark’s name but there was no answer so I walked through the first floor. When I got to the sunroom …” Grace stopped.
Dubois had seen Crosby’s body sprawled on the white rug in the sunroom. “What did you do?”
“I dialled 911 on my cellphone. I was careful not to touch anything.”
Dubois put his notebook back in the outside pocket of his uniform. “Tell me why you were at his place again?”
Grace realized that Dubois was watching her reactions closely. She wondered what was the right response. She shook her head. “It was a work related matter. I was supposed to sit second-chair on one of his cases.”
Dubois looked sceptical. “Couldn’t you have waited till tomorrow to discuss work at the office?”
“In hindsight I should’ve.”
Dubois was about to say something when a detective who had been questioning the neighbours walked in, and motioned for his attention. “Neighbours say he was an okay guy. But a lot of them didn’t like him as a judge,” he said, reading from his notepad.
“Whaddya mean?” Ignoring Grace, Dubois turned his attention to the cop.
“Too left-wing. Too soft. He let a lot of refugees into the country. Several of his cases had criminal records. Some of them were up on murder charges. Like the guy who held up a convenience store this year. According to the fella living in the white house across the street, a lot of right-wing groups hated him. Used to protest every now and then in front of his house. Police would have to be called in and disperse the commotion.”
“In other words, a lot of folks were up to date on his legal decisions,” said Dubois.
“Yeah. He wasn’t well liked. Finding the perp is gonna be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said the younger detective.
“My thinking is, he got whacked by someone who was negatively affected by one of his left-wing decisions,” said the older detective.
“What about that, Ms. Wang-Weinstein? You and your friend get a lot of death threats?”
“Yes, we do. We get so many it’s hard to take them seriously.” Everything about the situation seemed unreal to Grace, except the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Takes a lot of nerve to kill somebody on a fairly busy street. How the hell did the perps know that he had just gotten off the plane?” Dubois answered his own question as he flipped through the papers on the clipboard. “Could only know that if they were following him. Do we have profiles of wacko amateur groups? Let’s check his answering machine at work and visit his office. See if he had any death threats there.”
“I’ll look into it. I’ll call the telephone company and get a record of all incoming and outgoing calls for the past week.”
“Other than that, all we can do is speculate. Until some group claims responsibility,” commented the younger detective.
“Ms. Wang-Weinstein, your help is greatly appreciated,” said Dubois. “All I have to ask you to do now is come down to the station with me and give us a written statement.”
“No problem,” said Grace.
Ushering Grace out, Dubois closed the door behind him and ducked underneath the yellow tape. “Crosby may have been an asshole on some of his court decisions. But he didn’t deserve the death penalty.”
Discovering the body had been bad, very bad, but being forced to relive it under police interrogation was almost worse. By the time she left the police station, it was almost ten at night. She was shaking, emotionally and physically wrung out.
Thank God she did not have a case to deal with tomorrow. She decided to call Ellen Winkler. She didn’t feel inclined to go home to an empty house. She needed a friend who would understand and not berate her. Her friendship with Ellen had started a little more than four years ago. They had met in the sauna at her health club. In that hot, surreal atmosphere, sitting naked wrapped in white towels, faces covered in a clay aromatherapy masque, the two women had discovered they had a great deal in common besides the legal profession. Ellen was a federal court clerk, and like Grace she was single. Within minutes of meeting, they were swapping biographies and gossip about all the weird and wonderful men they had known.
She had a hunch that Ellen would still be at work, reviewing court applications and drafting legal decisions. Most days
, her friend called it quits at ten, ten thirty. She dialled Ellen’s number, and began to pour out what had happened to her from the beginning. As soon as Ellen understood what Grace was telling her, she took control. “Where are you? You’re less than ten minutes away. Meet me here,” she ordered.
Grace hailed a cab to the Federal Court, where Ellen clerked for Justice Angus. After paying the cabbie, she dragged herself up the wide stone steps. She was in no mood to admire the imposing edifice of stone and marble. Nor the Latin inscriptions pertaining to justice stencilled in ornate script on the granite stone face above the building. Grace waited in the handsome lobby with its neo-classical columns. In less than five minutes, a short woman with dark, tight curly hair appeared from behind a large pair of oak doors.
“How terrible for you,” Ellen said, holding out her arms.
They embraced like sisters. “Where to?” asked Ellen.
“I haven’t had dinner. And I need a stiff drink. Let’s go to one of those cafés along the canal?”
“Grace, you’re exhausted. Come on,” said Ellen, motioning with her chin for Grace to follow, “never mind a café, we’ll go back to my place and put our feet up.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Grace, linking her arm around Ellen’s.
chapter nine
The glittering art-deco ballroom, decorated to evoke the opulent style of Shanghai in the 1930s, was crowded with fashionably dressed members of the country’s Asian business elite. The black-tie fundraiser for the Yung Kee Foundation was one of the few high-profile events that drew the society types together with the corporate and the political heavies. This year the charity ball was being held in the penthouse of the Asia-Pacific Bank.
At the last minute, Grace had decided to come. Taking a little time off to see old friends and have some fun might help her stop brooding over Crosby’s murder. In the last few days she had thought of little else. Crosby had been the most left-wing adjudicator on the bench. Was there any significance in that? Why did she have the awful thought that she would be next? She could not shake the sense of foreboding.
In no mood to shop, she wore the same strapless red organza gown as in the previous two years, hoping no one would notice. As she stood in line for drinks, she ran into an old acquaintance from her days on the Asia Business Council.
“Sandra. Good to see you.”
The two women air-kissed each other, then Grace stepped back to examine the other woman’s dress. “Daring Sandra. Burnt velvet with large see-through patches.” Grace gave a wolf whistle. “I wish I had the bod.”
“Darling, you do!” exclaimed Sandra Lim. “Your problem is you’ve no courage.”
“No, Sandra, it’s the fact that I’m not a hundred and five pounds. Who’s that woman over there? The one dripping in jewels?”
“That’s Angela Kwok. She used to be the mistress of that Taiwan tycoon who had the license to manufacture computers for Compaq, Dell, or whatever. It’s all the same to me.”
Grace eyed the voluptuous woman. She was with an aging Caucasian, who kept a possessive arm around her waist. “Who’s the man?”
“Big real estate developer. He likes that type,” Sandra whispered conspiratorially. “Attends every year with a different bird on his arm.”
“Sandra, you know everybody.”
“That’s because I’m one of the ladies who lunch, my dear.” She laughed.
They moved around the room, sampling the hors d’oeuvres that elegant young waiters offered on silver trays. Grace noticed heads turning to look at them. Sandra was looking spectacular.
“Who’s the old white guy that has people lining up ten deep to shake his hand?” asked Sandra, biting into a crab cake.
“That’s Senator Goldman. In fact, I see that the political and business communities are well represented here. Oh shit! There’s my boss.”
“Who?”
“The immigration minister himself,” answered Grace, grabbing Sandra by the elbow, swinging her around in another direction, “and I don’t want to say hello. We’ll just ending up talking shop. In fact, all I really want is to get as far away from work as possible.”
“I can’t blame you. It must be dreadful to be tied down to a nine-to-five job.”
“Try seven to seven,” Grace corrected her.
Sandra gasped. “Really?”
Grace grabbed a second glass of wine from a waiter in a penguin costume of black coattails and white linen, and swivelling her head discreetly, did a quick head count of government officials, political lobbyists and foreign diplomats. “Do you know these people, Sandra? I can see hustlers of every stripe, all networking away like crazy while pretending to celebrate a worthy fundraising cause. How many of them are friends of yours?”
“Put like that, none of them,” said Sandra, laughing. “But, Grace, I see quite a few politicians here. Maybe you should be networking, too.”
“Why? They’re canvassing for votes in the next election. And panhandling for campaign contributions to finance their next election campaign.”
“Grace, you’re such a cynic. We want them here. Business people need a chance to lobby for deals, concessions and lower taxes.”
“Spoken like a true spouse of a business entrepreneur,” said Grace dryly, and reaching for a dim sum treat from the wagon going around the room, let her gaze pass over the throng. A man in a well-cut suit was staring back at her, but her cool glance didn’t connect with his. Turning around, she could feel his eyes burning into her back. She couldn’t tell whether his interest in her was sexual, romantic or political, and she didn’t care, but she didn’t like the way he had been watching her for the past half hour.
“Let’s check out the next room where they’re auctioning off goods,” she suggested.
The adjoining room was crammed with high-priced furniture, jewellery and other items, all with big price tags. Grace admired an Oriental room divider of carved rosewood, but the listed bid price made her gasp aloud.
They walked around the room, admiring the objets d’art. “See all those guys over there?” Sandra whispered, discreetly indicating a group of prosperous-looking men, “you can bet that their wives wait patiently at home every night with the burnt moo shoo pork while they paint the town red with their mistresses.”
“I guess it’s a good thing we’re not married to any of them. Who’s the Chink talking to our trade minister?”
“That’s Rick Huang. He runs a import-export conglomerate. He’s his own PR machine. He thinks he’s the conduit for most goods moving between Asia and the rest of the world. Sells everything to everybody. From computer notepads made in Taiwan to air missiles to Iran, so they say.”
“So, not someone you’d want to be seen with in public. Wouldn’t surprise me if the intelligence community has his phone lines tapped.”
“In other words, you want me to say no if he asks me for an introduction to you?” joked Sandra, patting Grace on the arm. “I see my husband waving his arm off. He probably wants to introduce me to some business associate. Catch you later. Look, your friend Wa Sing is here.”
Catching his eye across the room, Grace smiled and waved to the old man, who lifted a hand in greeting and moved toward her. Every few steps, he had to stop to speak to someone. Her mother’s friend looked like an Oriental gnome with a white goatee, in an expensively tailored suit that was a size too big for him.
“Planning on gaining weight?” asked Grace, as she wrapped her arms around him. Wa Sing came up to her shoulders in height.
“I’m helping a tailor friend get established. He’s doing his best.” Wa Sing kissed her on the cheek. She watched his gently expressive face as he told her about his tailor friend’s difficulties. When her mother, Kim, had met Wa Sing in Hong Kong in the 1950s, a bond had quickly developed between them. But it was neither romantic nor sexual in nature. Rather, Kim Wang and Wa Sing discovered, to their delight, that their families had known each other as far back as the early 1900s. At that time, Kim’s uncle and Wa S
ing’s father had been early members of the Communist Party. In the 1920s the two men were sent by the Chinese Politburo to study Marxist-Leninist thought in Moscow; both embraced Russian communism and wanted to adopt certain elements of it in their own country. Their political allegiance had disastrous consequences for them later, when they were accused of spying for Russia and sentenced to re-education camps in the Chinese gulag. Kim never saw her uncle again.
In Hong Kong, Wa Sing and Kim lived in the same ghetto, and belonged to the same group of refugees who had sought the safety of the Colony during the war with the Communists in southern China. The prejudice they faced under the British helped shape their ideology. Like many, they believed that it was their own people, not the English, who had transformed the colonial backwater of Hong Kong into an Asian powerhouse.
After Kim married, she lost touch with Wa Sing until, years later in Vancouver, she was in Chinatown buying vegetables one day, and ran into him on the street. To a traditional Chinese person, a coincidence is never just a coincidence. They interpreted their meeting again as a sign that the continuation of their relationship would bring good fortune.
The story of Wa Sing’s coming to North America was the classic story of the ragged émigré who rises to riches. At first he struggled to support his family by working in Chinatown as a rice and tea peddler. In 1966, with his life savings of nine thousand dollars and another ten borrowed from the community, he bought himself a car dealership. By the seventies, with the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people, his business had increased tenfold, and in the mid-eighties he reinvented himself again as the head of an Asian conglomerate with offices in Vancouver, San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei. His empire spanned car dealerships, savings and loan institutions, aviation companies and health care. Last year Forbes had nominated him as the forty-ninth richest man in the world, and he was part of an elite Cantonese group that wielded significant financial and political power. Not bad for a man who had arrived in Canada with nothing but the shirt on his back and a grade three education.