White Ghost (6 page)

A
h Ming glanced down at the beeping cell phone lying on his desk displaying a text message from Ah Tien.

Father died. Must come home.

Ah Ming texted back:

Too risky. Stay where you are.

Standing in his New York hotel room overlooking Chinatown's Hester Street, Ah Tien felt his body turn molten in horror and anger as he read the words. A principle at the heart of his life was at stake:

Eldest sons bury their fathers.

I am the eldest son.

I will bury my father.

From the moment his grandfather died almost a generation earlier, he'd understood this obligation, and it wasn't one he could shake off.

Although his eyes stared at the cell-phone screen, his mind
saw his grieving mother and younger brother sitting at the kitchen table in their little bungalow in San Francisco, surrounded by the blue-gray smoke of incense, waiting for him to return and fulfill his duty.

Even Ah Ming, once a fugitive hiding in Thailand in the mid-1980s, had bragged that he'd snuck back home to Taiwan to bury his father.

He hadn't left his mother to weep alone.

And wasn't that the point—the whole point—of Ah Ming telling me the story? That duty always trumps risk?

But, Ah Tien now realized, Ah Ming had only meant duties owed to him.

The question Ah Tien asked himself as he turned off his phone was simple.

Am I my father's son or not?

Three hours later, Ah Tien answered that question by boarding a flight from Kennedy International Airport back to SFO.

A
S
A
H
T
IEN STEPPED OUT OF THE TAXI
in front of his mother's house that night, he glanced over at the two young Vietnamese men down the block with their heads shadowed by the raised hood of a white two-door Acura. The scene gave him a feeling of familiarity and predictability, of normalcy. Modifying cars was so much a rite of passage in the neighborhood that the driveway of nearly every house and the pavement in front had been blackened by oil and transmission fluid.

Ah Tien paid the driver, then retrieved his carry-on and briefcase from the trunk and climbed the concrete stairs, the heaviness of his step, weary and grieving, bearing the weight of his duty.

T
HE
V
IETNAMESE MEN ALERTED TO
A
H
T
IEN
as he emerged into the bright funnel of the streetlight. They watched him
glance their way as he ascended the concrete steps to the front door. After he disappeared inside, Minh Duc Le slid into the passenger seat of the Acura and made a call. Moments later, a black cargo van crept up the street and stopped in front of the house. The driver signaled to Le and his partner, who then approached the front door.

When Ah Tien responded to his knock, Le pointed a 9mm at his stomach and said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”

Ah Tien knew who and he knew why, and he'd practiced what he'd say during his flight back from New York.

When he glanced down at the gun, he saw that the porch light illuminated a familiar tattoo on Le's wrist:
Tien
. Money. He didn't doubt that Le's sleeve hid four others:
Tinh,
Toi,
Thu,
and
Tu
. Love, Crime, Revenge, and Prison.

Le and his partner bracketed Ah Tien as they urged him down the stairs toward the van's open side door. Just after Ah Tien climbed in, they pushed him to the floor, then bound and blindfolded him.

Whatever fear Ah Tien felt was muted by grief and by the confidence that the loyalty he'd shown over the years would serve as a bulwark against Ah Ming's anger.

As they drove, Ah Tien heard the silence broken only by the bump and rush of the tire tread on the pavement, the whoosh and rumble of passing cars, and Le's voice directing the driver's turns.

Thirty minutes after they started moving, the traffic sounds began to fade. Ah Tien imagined that they'd driven into the Bayview warehouse district, maybe even to East Wind itself.

The van stopped and then rocked as the side door slid open.

Ah Tien felt himself wrenched from the floor. Cool ocean air struck his face as he tumbled to the sidewalk. His head thudded against the concrete. Hands gripped his upper arms and yanked him onto his knees. Through the nausea and daze of a concus
sion, Ah Tien heard footsteps approach, certain it was Ah Ming coming to confront him. He searched for the words he'd practiced, the ones that would resonate with their past bond, the culture they shared, and the obligations weighing on them that he knew would save his life.

A
s his wife drove the winding road up the canyon after teaching her evening graduate seminar, Gage sat by the fireplace of their East Bay hillside home, an unopened book in his hand. The metallic rumble of the automatic garage door broke through Gage's insulation of exhaustion. The sound pushed him to his feet and walked him to the front door.

“Any news?” Faith asked, as he took her jacket.

“Dr. Goode's office called. They'll have the radiologist's report by tomorrow. They want us in the day after.”

Faith inspected his face. “How do you feel?”

“The usual. How was class?”

Faith smiled. “The usual.”

Gage poured her a glass of wine, then joined her on the couch. They sat in silence, looking toward the bay and the lights of San Francisco beyond. After a few minutes, he leaned back and closed his eyes. Moments later he was asleep.

Faith gazed over at him, then ran her fingers through his hair, looking through the shadow of the coming appointment back at how their life together began.

She never thought she'd ever date a cop, even an ex-cop,
much less marry one. She didn't like guns, didn't like uniforms, and didn't like the rigidity of thought that these entailed.

But this one had been different.

Older than the others in the Berkeley graduate philosophy seminar, he'd sat silently, week after week. Listening. Thinking. The fifteen students were intimidated by him. And it wasn't merely that among those who wanted to believe their pens were mightier than others' swords, he was the only one who'd ever carried a gun. Rather, it was that he wasn't driven to speak by nervousness, by a desire to impress the others, or by a need to ask ingratiating questions of the professor.

The others whispered about him, concluding in the end that he must be brilliant, that somehow he knew it all already.

Faith took a sip of wine and smiled to herself as she remembered the first words he spoke, six weeks into the quarter.

“I'm not sure we've really grasped what Hobbes was trying to tell us.”

He then described a homicide he'd investigated, a rape and murder of a child. He wove together passages from
Leviathan, On the
Body,
and
Human Nature
with what witnesses had told him, the evidence the crime scene people found, his interview of the murderer, and finally a rival gang stabbing him to death in prison.

Faith remembered the silence in the room when he'd finished. What he said had terrified them, for they'd discovered the state of nature in their own hearts: they'd all wanted to knife the murderer themselves.

It hadn't been the analysis that had captured her, it was how he'd begun.

I'm not sure.

And that was true. He wasn't. He only knew that somehow, if he thought deeply and carefully enough, he'd better understand what had led to those two dead human beings, those two wasted lives, and understanding all that made a difference to him.

Until that moment, Faith assumed that Gage, like the others in the seminar, would go on to an academic career. But it was clear after he'd spoken that this was a man who needed to be in the world and that for him, right and wrong would never be matters only for academic debate. He'd only be in graduate school long enough to get what he came for, and that wasn't long.

He left after two years and went back into the world.

Faith looked out toward San Francisco, the lines of traffic crossing the Bay Bridge, the necklace of lights circling Lake Merritt in the foreground, tugboats guiding tankers into the port. She sipped her wine, enjoying the last of the warmth flowing from the graying coals in the fireplace, and wondering whether there was a wife sitting next to her husband on a couch in San Francisco, looking at the lights sparkling in the hills, and worrying what life-changing words a doctor might say two days later.

She finished her wine and then reached for the two afghans knitted by Gage's grandmother that lay draped on the back of the couch. She covered him with one and wrapped the other around her shoulders, and as the embers faded, she joined him in sleep.

W
hen Gage looked up, he saw Alex Z entering his office wearing the expectant expression he acquired when he discovered a fact that at least for a fragile moment had deprived the world of its confusions.

“Heard something on the radio just as I pulled into the lot. A homeless guy named Lester Hardiman found Hai-tien Fong murdered last night. Pretty gruesome. Shot in the face. He was ID'd from prints.”

The death ambushed Gage like quicksand. He'd hoped to walk through or over Fong to find a connection between Ah Ming and the robbery and then out of the case.

Gage shook his head. “We should've gotten to him.”

“No chance, boss. SFPD is saying he'd been out of town on business for four days and only got back last night, less than an hour before he was killed.”

Gage and Alex Z both looked over at the wall calendar and came to the same conclusion. Alex Z said it aloud.

“Ah Tien left town the same day as the robbery.”

“So did about twenty thousand other people. Call Sylvia. Ask her to get down to the Hall of Justice.”

An hour and a half later former SFPD homicide detective Sylvia Washington called back.

“I've been working over my old partner. You were right, Fong's gang name was Ah Tien. He hasn't come up on the task force radar for a long, long time, but they're still thinking it's gang related because he was shot in a way that sends a message, but there's been no mention of Ah Ming.”

“You didn't—”

“I figured you'd want to keep that name to yourself.”

“Was he killed where he was found?”

“Looks that way. Most of the blood spatter was absorbed by the blindfold, but there was some on the warehouse wall behind him. It must've been small caliber. The slug didn't come out the back of his head.”

Gage heard her flipping pages in her notebook.

“It looks like the killer rolled the body back and forth to strip him of ID. Emptied everything from his pockets. Cleaned him out.”

“Anybody hear the shot?”

“The beat cops did a neighborhood canvass and turned up a shipping clerk working late who heard a pop. But that was about forty minutes before Hardiman found the body. The witness thought it was a distant backfire. Homicide thinks it's unrelated, but it seems to me it's too early in the investigation to conclude anything.”

“Me, too. Where's Hardiman now?”

“In booking. He failed to appear on a trespassing charge a few months ago, so he needs to clear a warrant. As a reward for his cooperation, they'll be citing him out and giving him a court date in a couple of weeks.”

“Wait for him. Take him out for breakfast and pump him with coffee. Promise him you'll get him a hotel room for a couple of days, then bring him here.”

“No problem. Except I'll have to stop on the way to buy him some shoes. The detectives took his so they won't confuse his tread with the shooter's.”

“Thanks. You did a great job.”

“Them sharing a little information with me is part of my retirement plan. I gave them twenty-three years, eight months, and four and a half days of my life. It's the least they can do.”

N
ext to Sylvia Washington's solid five-eight and one-forty, the man she directed into the conference room an hour later looked to Gage like a scarecrow she'd yanked out of a Dumpster.

Lester Hardiman was short, skinny, hairy, red-nosed, exhausted, and somewhere between forty-five and fifty. He also smelled like three uninterrupted months on the street, and the odor ratcheted up the nausea that now infused Gage's life.

Gage had Sylvia take away Lester's oil-and-grease-caked army surplus jacket and then sat him in a wooden chair on the opposite side of the conference table. He didn't want Lester to leave his grime and stench behind on a cloth one.

“Lester,” Gage said, “I know you're just a guy trying to get along, support yourself, and stay out of trouble.”

Lester grinned. “Low profile. That's me all the way.”

“And you wouldn't do anything that might interfere with us finding out who killed the guy.”

Lester nodded.

“So we understand each other?”

“Sure.”

“Now, you know what happens when someone gets shot in the head?” Gage didn't wait for an answer. “The bullet goes in, bounces around, then the person dies because his brain stops working.”

Lester nodded again.

“And what else happens?”

Lester shrugged.

“Have you heard of blood spatter and blowback?”

“I know what blood splatter is.”

“Blood spatter. It's called blood spatter. You know what blowback is?”

“No.”

“Blowback is the fine particles of burned gunpowder and blood and brain that explodes back out of the wound. It floats around for a while, and then settles down. It's almost invisible. But it transfers to anything that rubs against it.”

Sylvia returned and sat next to Gage.

“Let me ask you something else. You know that someone out there heard the gunshot, right?”

“I overheard the police talking. They was saying it was a backfire.”

“I know that's what they were saying, but you know it wasn't.”

“I don't know that.”

“Of course you do. We both know what really happened.”

“You don't know shit.” Lester sat up, now trying to stare down Gage.

Gage leaned forward and pointed his forefinger between Lester's eyes.

“Don't try to play the tough guy. You don't have it in you.”

Lester blinked, then drew back. His eyes remained fixed on Gage's hand as he lowered it to the table

“First you heard a shot, then the sound of a car drive away.”

Lester looked up.

“You searched until you found where the sounds came from. You went up to the body and kicked it with your shoe. When it didn't respond, you got down on your knees and rolled it back and forth so you could get to all his pockets and strip off his watch and rings.”

Lester swallowed.

“What gave you away is that you cleaned him out, even took all the change. You shouldn't have taken the change. Real tough guys don't take the change.”

“You're lying.” Lester's voice rose, then hardened. “I didn't take shit.”

“What do you think we're going to find when we check your jacket for blowback?”

Lester reached with his right hand and grabbed his left forearm as if to wipe it off, but all he touched was shirt. He bit his lip and his face twisted.

“What really happened is that you gathered up everything, hid it far enough away so the police wouldn't find it, then came back, found a phone, and called 911. That's the forty-minute gap.”

Lester glanced toward the door.

“Don't even think about looking to grab your jacket and making a run for it. It's already bagged and gone.”

Lester looked at Sylvia as if for rescue. She stared back. His frightened eyes returned to Gage.

“Are you gonna turn me in?”

Gage shook his head. “You can even keep the dead guy's money, but I'm keeping your jacket and you'll give Sylvia everything else you took. She'll buy you a new coat, rent you a hotel room for a few days, then we're done.”

“You gotta promise not to turn me in,” Lester said, the desperation in his voice as thick as a prison wall. He swallowed again and rubbed his hands together. “I mean, I can't have this
coming back on me. I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was young so I got two strikes. I can't take no more cases.”

“We won't volunteer anything to the police, but if they figure it out on their own, you'll have to fend for yourself.”

Sylvia motioned with her head for Lester to move on out.

After they left, Gage realized he was sweating under his jacket. He removed it and found that perspiration had soaked through his shirt. In his concentration on Lester, he'd been oblivious to it. He heard a door close down the hallway and wondered whether Sylvia had noticed it, and how he would explain it away.