Nine Dragons (40 page)

“Are you associated with a triad, Henry?”

Lau burst out laughing.

“What? What the fuck are you—look, I’m out of here.”

He slapped Bosch’s hand away and pushed off the wall in the direction of the door again. It was a move Harry was ready for. He grabbed Lau by the arm and spun him around. He clipped his ankle with a kick and threw him facedown on the bed. He then moved in, kneeling on his back while he cuffed him.

“This is fucking crazy!” Lau yelled. “You can’t do this!”

“Calm down, Henry, just calm down,” Bosch said. “We’re going to go downtown and straighten all of this out.”

“But I’ve got a movie! I have to be on the set in three hours!”

“Fuck the movies, Henry. This is real life and we’re going downtown.”

Bosch pulled him up off the bed and pointed him toward the door.

“Dave, you got all of that secured?”

“Got it.”

“Then, lead the way.”

Chu left the room, carrying the metal box containing the Glock. Bosch followed, keeping Lau in front of him and keeping one hand on the chain between the cuffs. They moved down the hall, but when they got to the top of the stairs, Bosch pulled the cuffs like the reins on a horse and stopped.

“Wait a minute. Back up here.”

He walked Lau backwards to the middle of the hall. Something had caught Bosch’s eye as they had passed but it didn’t register until they got to the stairs. Now he looked at the framed diploma from the University of Southern California. Lau had graduated with a liberal arts degree in 2004.

“You went to SC?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah, the film school. Why?”

Both the school and graduation year matched the diploma Bosch had seen in the back office at Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. And then there was the Chinese connection as well. Bosch knew that a lot of kids went to USC and several thousand graduated every year, many of them of Chinese descent. But he had never trusted coincidences.

“Did you know a guy at SC named Robert Li—spelled
L-I
?”

Lau nodded.

“Yeah, I knew him. He was my roommate.”

Bosch felt things suddenly begin to crash together with an undeniable force.

“What about Eugene Lam? Did you know him?”

Lau nodded again.

“I still do. He was my roommate back then, too.”

“Where?”

“Like I told you, a shithole down in gangland. Near the campus.”

Bosch knew that USC was an oasis of fine and expensive education surrounded by hardscrabble neighborhoods where personal safety would be an issue. A few years back a football player on the practice field had even been hit with a stray round from a nearby gang shooting.

“Is that why you bought the gun? For protection down there?”

“Exactly.”

Chu had realized he had lost them and came hurrying back up the stairs and down the hallway.

“Harry, what’s up?”

Bosch held up his free hand to signal Chu to hang back and be quiet. He spoke to Lau again.

“And those guys knew you bought the gun six years ago?”

“We went together. They helped me pick it out. Why are you—”

“Are you still friends? You stay in touch?”

“Yeah, but what’s this got to do with—”

“When was the last time you saw one of them?”

“I saw them both last week. We play poker almost every week.”

Bosch glanced over at Chu. The case had just broken wide open.

“Where, Henry? Where do you play?”

“Most of the time right here. Robert still lives with his parents and Huge has a tiny place in the Valley. I mean, come on, I’ve got the beach here.”

“What day did you play last week?”

“It was Wednesday.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, because I remember it was the night before my shoot was going to start and I didn’t really want to play. But they showed up and we played for a little bit. It was a short night.”

“And the time before that? When was that?”

“The week before. Wednesday or Thursday, I can’t remember.”

“But it was after the shooting on the beach?”

Lau shrugged.

“Yeah, pretty sure. Why?”

“What about the key to the box? Would one of them have known where the key was?”

“What did they do?”

“Just answer the question, Henry.”

“Yeah, they knew. They used to like to get the gun out sometimes and play around with it.”

Bosch pulled his keys out and uncuffed Lau. The screenwriter turned and started to massage his wrists.

“I always wondered what that felt like,” he said. “So I could write about it. The last time I was too drunk to remember.”

He finally looked up and saw Bosch’s intent stare.

“What’s going on?”

Bosch put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the stairs.

“Let’s go back down to the living room and talk, Henry. I think there is a lot you can tell us.”

45

T
hey waited for Eugene Lam in the alley behind Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. There was a small employee lot squeezed between a row of trash bins and the stacks of baled cardboard. It was Thursday, two days after they had visited Henry Lau, and the case had come together. They had used the time to work on evidence gathering and testing, and to prepare a strategy. Bosch had also used the time to enroll his daughter in the school at the bottom of the hill. She had started classes that morning.

They believed Eugene Lam was the shooter but also the weaker of the two suspects. They would bring him in first, then Robert Li second. They were locked and loaded and as Bosch watched the parking lot, he felt certain that the killing of John Li would be understood and resolved by the end of the day.

“Here we go,” Chu said.

He pointed to the mouth of the alley. Lam’s car had just turned in.

They put Lam in the first interview room and let him cook for a while. Time always favored the interviewer, never the suspect. In RHD, they called it “seasoning the roast.” You let the suspect marinate in time. It always made him more tender. Bo-Jing Chang had been the exception to this rule. He hadn’t said a word and had held up like a rock. Innocence gave you that resolve, and that was something Lam didn’t have.

An hour later, after conferring with a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, Bosch entered the room carrying a cardboard box containing the case evidence and sat down across the table from Lam. The suspect looked up with scared eyes. They always did after a period of isolation. What was just an hour on the outside was an eternity inside. Bosch put the box down on the floor, then folded his arms on the table.

“Eugene, I’m here to explain the facts of life to you,” he said. “So listen closely to what I tell you. You have a big choice to make here. The fact of the matter is that you are going to prison. There’s no doubt about that. But what you are going to decide here in the next few minutes is how long you go for. It can be until you are a very old man or until they stick the needle in your arm and put you down like a dog…

“Or you can leave yourself a chance at getting your freedom back one day. You’re a very young man, Eugene. I hope you make the right choice.”

He paused and waited but Lam didn’t react.

“It’s sort of funny. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve sat across a table like this with a lot of men who have killed. I can’t say they were all bad or evil men. Some had reasons and some were manipulated. They got led down the path.”

Lam shook his head in a show of bravado.

“I told you people, I want a lawyer. I know my rights. You can’t ask me any questions once I ask for a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, Eugene. Absolutely right. Once you’ve invoked your rights we can’t question you. Not allowed. But, see, that’s why I’m not asking you anything here. I’m just telling you how it is going to be. I’m telling you that you have a choice to make here. Silence is certainly a choice. But if you choose silence, you’ll never see the outside world again.”

Lam shook his head and looked down at the table.

“Please leave me alone.”

“Maybe it would help you if I summarized things and gave you a clearer picture of where you’re at here. You see, I am perfectly willing to share with you, man. I’ll show you my whole hand because, you know what? It’s a royal flush. You play poker, right? You know that’s the hand that can’t be beat. And that’s what I’ve got here. A royal fucking flush.”

Bosch paused. He could see curiosity in Lam’s eyes. He couldn’t help but wonder what they had on him.

“We know you did the dirty work on this thing, Eugene. You went into that store and you shot Mr. Li dead in cold blood. But we’re pretty sure it wasn’t your idea. It was Robert who sent you in there to kill his father. And he’s the one we want. I’ve got a deputy district attorney sitting in the other room and he’s ready to make you a deal—fifteen to life if you give us Robert. You’ll do the fifteen for sure, but after that, you get a shot at freedom. You convince a parole board you were just a victim, that you got manipulated by a master, and you walk free…

“It could happen. But if you go the other way, you roll the dice. If you lose, you’re done. You’re talking about dying in prison in fifty years—if the jury doesn’t decide to stick the needle in your arm first.”

Lam quietly said, “I want a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded and responded with resignation in his voice.

“Okay, man, that’s your choice. We’ll get you a lawyer.”

He looked up at the ceiling where the camera was located and raised an imaginary phone to his ear.

He then looked back at Lam and knew he wasn’t going to be convinced by words alone. It was show-and-tell time.

“All right, they’re making the call. If you don’t mind, while we’re waiting here I’m going to tell you a few things. You can share them with your lawyer when he gets here.”

“Whatever,” Lam said. “I don’t care what you say as long as I get the attorney.”

“Okay, then, let’s start with the crime scene. You know, there were a few things about it that bothered me from the beginning. One was that Mr. Li had the gun right there under the counter and never got the chance to pull it. Another was that there were no head wounds. Mr. Li was shot three times in the chest and that was it. No shot to the face.”

“Very interesting,” Lam said sarcastically.

Bosch ignored it.

“And you know what all of that told me? That said that Li probably knew his killer and hadn’t felt threatened. And that this was a piece of business. This wasn’t revenge, this wasn’t personal. This was purely a piece of business.”

Bosch reached down to the box and removed the lid. He reached in for the plastic evidence bag that held the bullet casing taken from the victim’s throat. He tossed it on the table in front of Lam.

“There it is, Eugene. You remember looking for that? Coming around the counter, moving the body, wondering what the fuck happened to that casing? Well, there it is. There’s the one mistake that brought it all down on you.”

He paused while Lam stared at the casing, fear permanently lodging in his eyes.

“You never leave a soldier behind. Isn’t that the shooter’s rule? But you did, man. You left that soldier behind and it brought us right to your door.”

Bosch picked up the bag and held it up between them.

“There was a fingerprint on the casing, Eugene. We raised it with something called electrostatic enhancement. EE, for short. It’s a new science for us. And the print we got belonged to your old roommate Henry Lau. Yeah, it led us to Henry and he was very cooperative. He told us the last time he fired and then reloaded his gun was at a range about eight months ago. His fingerprint was sitting on that shell all that time.”

Harry reached down to the box and removed Henry Lau’s gun, still in its black felt bag. He took it out of the bag and put the weapon down on the table.

“We went to Henry and he gave us the weapon. We had it checked out by ballistics yesterday, and sure enough, it’s our murder weapon, all right. This is the gun that killed John Li at Fortune Liquors on September eighth. The problem was that Henry Lau has a solid alibi for the time of the shooting. He was in a room with thirteen other people. He’s even got Matthew McConaughey as an alibi witness. And then on top of that, he told us he hadn’t given his gun out to anybody to borrow.”

Bosch leaned back and scratched his chin with his hand, as if he were still trying to figure out how the gun ended up being used to kill John Li.

“Damn, this was a big problem, Eugene. But then, of course, we got lucky. The good guys often get lucky. You made us lucky, Eugene.”

He paused for effect and then brought down the hammer.

“You see, whoever used Henry’s gun to kill John Li cleaned it up after and then reloaded it so Henry wouldn’t ever know his gun had been borrowed and used to kill a man. It was a pretty good plan, but he made one mistake.”

Bosch leaned forward across the table and looked at Lam eye to eye. He turned the gun on the table so that its barrel was pointing at the suspect’s chest.

“One of the bullets that were replaced in the magazine had a nice readable thumbprint on it. Your thumbprint, Eugene. We matched it to the print they took when you traded in your New York driver’s license for a California DL.”

Lam’s eyes slowly dropped away from Bosch’s and down to the table.

“All of this, it means nothing,” he said.

There was little conviction in his voice.

“Yeah?” Bosch responded. “Really? I don’t know about that. I happen to think it means a lot, Eugene. And the prosecutor on the other side of that camera is thinking the same thing. He says it sounds like a prison door slamming, with you standing there on the wrong side of it.”

Bosch picked up the gun and the bag with the casing in it and put them back in the box. He grabbed the box with both hands and stood up.

“So that’s where we’re at, Eugene. You think about all of that while you’re waiting for your lawyer.”

Bosch slowly moved toward the door. He hoped Lam would tell him to stop and come back, that he wanted to make the deal. But the suspect said nothing. Harry put the box under one arm, opened the door and walked out.