by Scott Mackay
“Officer Kennedy says he found no dish towel at the scene, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But Sung insists he tried to stanch the flow of blood with a dish towel?”
“That’s what he said.”
Blackstein shook his head. “Edgar should have made it, then,” said the doctor. “He’s young, he’s strong, he was able to press a ball of Kleenex to his own abdomen.” Blackstein glanced at the twelve-inch Christmas tree sitting on top of Gilbert’s shelf next to some thick legal binders, a macabre little evergreen hung with the brass shell casings of .45-caliber bullets. “How long before the paramedics got there?”
“Seven minutes after Officer Kennedy did.”
Blackstein shook his head. “I don’t know, Barry,” he said. “He survived that first gunshot wound out in Vancouver, and from what I can tell, it was a lot worse than this one, more point-blank. The bullet in our gunshot wound entered his abdomen on the left, grazed his stomach as it penetrated the diaphragm, and came to a stop against his rib cage on the right, really no more than a subsurface scratch, staying well clear of his vital organs and arteries. For him to bleed to death the way he did, someone would have to pull the dressing away and disrupt coagulation. And the only one who could have done that, according to all the time lines you’ve got in your various reports, is Officer Kennedy.”
Nine
It rained on Christmas Day. By four o’clock a major storm moved in. The clouds hovered low to the ground like a blanket of charcoal dust, dark and menacing. On the radio the weatherman cautioned people to stay home. Hail fell with menacing persistence for about five minutes, then changed into a heavy downpour.
Gilbert walked into the kitchen to see how Regina was making out. She wore her new dress, the blue one Nina had picked out for her. She cut celery sticks. He looked her up and down.
“What?” she said, turning to him.
“I haven’t seen you in a dress like that for a long time,” he said.
She smiled. “Do I look good?”
He stared at the dress. Finally he said, “It seems a little young for you.”
She stopped cutting celery sticks. “Careful, buster,” she said. “I’ve got a knife in my hand.”
“I wouldn’t wear it to school. Your students…I don’t think they would…I don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t wear it with my Reeboks,” she said. “You need proper shoes for a dress like this.”
“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “The shoes. With that kind of dress you need three-inch pumps.”
“What do you expect?” she said good-humoredly. “You let your fifteen-year-old daughter pick it out. She forgets I’m fifty.”
Gilbert’s eyes narrowed. “Are you really that old?” he said. “You don’t look a day over forty-nine.”
She smiled. “Do I have to remind you about this knife again?”
“At least Joe’s looking at you,” he said.
“Joe looks at anybody.”
He went up and slipped his arm around her waist. “Let’s not make remarks about my partner,” he said. “He saved Christmas.”
Regina nodded with relief. “I’m glad she’s come out of it,” she said.
“It’s the Lombardo charm,” he said. “Teenage angst doesn’t stand a chance against it.”
But as Gilbert went back to the living room he still felt unsettled about Jennifer. The fire crackled, the Christmas tree glittered, and Nina had some forgettable a cappella pop group crooning love songs on the CD player. Joe sat on one sofa, Jennifer on the other. Joe stared at the fire. Jennifer stared at Joe. She had her hair washed. She had her hair up. The turquoise streak was gone. She wore her new dress, a Christmas present from her mother. She’d taken a tip from Nina about makeup. She didn’t look like an extra from Night of the Living Dead anymore. She looked pretty, with wispy strands of blond hair shining like gold around her slender neck, her skin looking freshly scrubbed and healthy, her nails lacquered with a shade of rose-colored nail polish. She wore earrings. Her earrings made her look like a woman. If only she would stop staring at Lombardo with those love-sick eyes. Gilbert didn’t like it at all. She was drinking rum and eggnog. That was something else he had to get used to. She could drink legally now.
He sat down and sipped his own rum and eggnog. Nina was off in the corner reading her new Danielle Steel. Good. Now he had to get rid of Jennifer. He had to talk to Lombardo, at least for a few minutes, in private about this.
“Jennifer, your mother said she needed help in the kitchen with the vegetable tray,” he told her. “Before the other guests get here.”
Jennifer continued to stare at Joe, a soft grin on her face, her eyes misty with romance, then turned to her father. “Sure, Dad,” she said, as if everything were perfectly normal between them.
She got up with what he saw was affected poise and moved toward the kitchen. Gilbert felt as if he had somehow gotten himself into a pit of quicksand he couldn’t get out of. She was trying to make an impression on Joe.
Once she was gone he leaned forward. “So how’d it go on Friday night?” he asked. “She seems a lot better today.”
“I think she had fun,” said Lombardo, with a dismal attempt to downplay the damage.
“Did you go anywhere afterward?” asked Gilbert, annoyed at himself for prying. “I was expecting you home a little earlier.”
“We went to Pat and Mario’s for a drink,” said Lombardo. “Do you know the place? A perfect place to take a nineteen-year-old girl. A lot of young people there.”
Gilbert probed a little further. “I wasn’t expecting such a quick result.” He picked up a walnut from the wooden bowl and turned it in his fingers. “She usually keeps her moods a little longer.” He looked at Lombardo. “What did you do?”
Lombardo nodded, as if anticipating Gilbert’s question. “Little attentions, that’s all,” he said. “Helping her on with her coat. Pulling out her chair for her. Opening the car door. Making her feel like she matters.”
The two detectives sat silently for a few seconds. In the fireplace the logs popped and sparked, then settled into a long slow hiss. The rain lashed against the windows, dull and persistent, the unending theme song of the day, of the whole month.
“Did you see the way she looked at you just now?” asked Gilbert.
Lombardo stared steadily into his rum and eggnog. “I saw,” he said.
More silence. Gilbert shook his head. “What are we going to do about that, Joe?” he said.
The question had to be asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea,” said Gilbert.
Lombardo roused himself from his steady contemplation of his rum and eggnog and frowned. “What can I do now?” he asked, perplexed. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings. She’s your daughter.”
Gilbert shook his head, as bewildered as Lombardo. “I don’t know what we can do.”
“She talked a lot about you last night,” said Lombardo.
“She did?”
“You don’t want to hear.”
“That bad?”
“You don’t want to hear.”
“Is she ever going to like me again?” asked Gilbert.
Lombardo looked at him doubtfully. “She might,” he said, sitting up straight. “But it’s a crapshoot.”
Before Gilbert could ask anything else, Jennifer appeared in the front hall with a tray of vegetables and dip. “Joe, do you think you can help me with some of this?” she said. “I’ve got three dips here.”
Lombardo put his rum and eggnog down and got up quickly, as if she needed help crossing thin ice. “Sure,” he said. He treated her like a vial of nitroglycerin. “You got a big load there.” He went out to the hall to help her.
“Oh, look,” she said, once he reached her, “we’re under the mistletoe. That means you have to kiss me.”
Gilbert saw she had contrived this circumstance.
Lombardo glanced nervously at the mistl
etoe, then back at Gilbert. He then turned to Jennifer and kissed her. On the lips. For longer than he had to. Trying to make Jennifer feel that she mattered.
Gilbert felt as if he had just stepped into an alternate universe.
Gilbert went back to work on the twenty-seventh of December. He sat with Officer Donald Kennedy near the duty desk of 52 Division on Dundas Street. A large mural of helpful-looking police officers stared down at them from above, and the food-drive box, decorated with red shiny paper and silver tinsel, overflowed with boxes of macaroni and tinned fruit and vegetables. Gilbert shared with the constable the latest developments in the Edgar Lau murder case. Kennedy’s blue eyes peered with faint incredulity, as if everything Gilbert told him struck him as immaterial, an intrusion into his day. Gilbert smelled singed hair. Kennedy had just singed some of his hair while lighting a cigarette outside. Two square inches had gone all kinky and burned at the front. Gilbert told him about Pearl.
“We plan to pick her up at the airport tonight,” he said, trying to ignore the singed hair. “Joe’s going out there to get her. We thought you’d like to know what’s going on.”
Kennedy made a face, pressing his lips together in distaste. “But that’s not the real reason you came down here, is it?” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you look like you have a paddle up your ass.”
If the man wanted it straight, he would give it to him straight. “I want to talk about a few of the things in your report,” he said.
“Like what?” he asked, as if Gilbert were nothing but a nag, nags being the lowest form of life.
“Like the statement you took from Dock Wen.”
Kennedy’s rust-colored eyebrows pinched toward the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t faking. He looked puzzled. “I write a good police report,” he said. “I took down every word. If your case is going to fall apart, don’t go blaming it on my crime scene report. I’m no Shakespeare, but I write a decent report. Ask my captain. Ask anybody.”
“I’m not saying you don’t,” said Gilbert. “But Wen says the man he saw out back was white, not Chinese. And you got the man down as Chinese. We’re just trying to clear up the discrepancy.”
Kennedy’s face settled. “Wen told me the man was Chinese,” he said. “If he decides to change his story, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“And Edgar was still alive when you got there?” asked Gilbert.
“Yes,” said Kennedy. “But he was going fast.”
“Foster Sung says he tried to stop the bleeding with a dish towel. We didn’t find any dish towel.”
“Neither did I.” He flung the words at Gilbert.
“Okay,” he said. “Calm down.”
“Why don’t you ask Sung again?” suggested Kennedy.
“Did you leave the crime scene at any time?” asked Gilbert.
“I went out to the landing as the paramedics were coming up the stairs.”
“And you found no dish towel?”
“I found no dish towel.”
“But you saw the Kleenex?” said Gilbert.
“I saw the Kleenex. I got it in my report, don’t I? I wrote down everything. I don’t miss a thing. I never have. If someone tells me something wrong, or fucks with the scene afterward, don’t go blaming me. I write my report, and what I write in my report is what I saw at the scene, nothing more, nothing less.”
Lombardo was waiting for Gilbert back at headquarters with the ballistics comparison report. The bullet from the Vancouver shooting, the one that had wounded Edgar Lau back in August, had finally arrived. The young detective held up the printout.
“The Vancouver bullet was badly mashed,” he said. “Murphy said the comparison was difficult, but he says he can be at least seventy percent sure that the gun used on Edgar in Vancouver back in August might have been the same gun used in his murder a week ago Friday.”
“That’s great,” said Gilbert.
“I know, but seventy percent still leaves a jury considerable room for doubt.”
“At least it’s a start,” said Gilbert. “Did he say anything else?”
“He says he didn’t get a perfect set of lands and grooves on the Vancouver bullet, but the ones he did get matched. Not only that, the killer used the same unusual wadcutter slug in both cases, so as supporting evidence it’s fairly strong. If what Jeremy Austin told you about the Vancouver shooting is true, that Tony Mok was the shooter, then he might indeed be the perp in the Toronto shooting as well. I think we have the beginnings of a case against Mok.”
Gilbert stared at his paperweight made of bullets, his hands clasped before him in an inadvertent gesture of supplication. “Only we don’t have Mok,” he said.
“Not right yet,” said Lombardo. “But I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve found Rose and Henry Kwon?” said Gilbert.
“I have,” said Lombardo. “Like Immigration told you, Mok came over as an orphan. When he was eight. UNESCO arranged it through a program for orphaned children. I got in touch with someone at UNESCO today, and they filled in the picture. They said they had a case file on Mok, which they sent to the Children’s Aid Society here in town back in 1985, when Tony came over. I phoned the Children’s Aid Society and they’re going to send us his file. For Mok to come over here legally, he had to have a sponsoring guardian or relative in Hong Kong.”
“In Hong Kong?” said Gilbert.
“Foster Sung was his sponsoring guardian in Hong Kong,” said Lombardo. “Sung got him placed with the Kwons. Don’t look so surprised. Sung sponsored all sorts of orphaned refugee kids in Hong Kong. Tony’s just another. When I run across a connection like this, maybe I’m surprised at first, but you finally realize that it’s all got to join up somehow. Tony Mok connecting through a tangent like this, what else could we expect? You dig deep enough, you always find something like this. I bet half the orphans Sung sponsored turned into gang members. For sponsored orphan read recruit.”
Connections, Gilbert again thought. Foster Sung connecting to Tony Mok. Like the bonding element of an increasingly complex molecule, a structure of intent and motive, of crime and loss, of blood and community.
“We’ll have to talk to Foster Sung about Mok,” he said.
“I’ve tried contacting Sung but he’s not returning any of my calls,” said Lombardo.
“Christmas,” said Gilbert.
“Christmas,” agreed Lombardo. “But I had better luck with Rose and Henry Kwon. I found them. They’re on Beverley, north of the Art Gallery.”
“And you spoke to them?”
“I spoke to them.”
“And they know where we can find Tony?” asked Gilbert.
The smile disappeared from Lombardo’s face and he shook his head. “No,” he said, “they don’t know where we can find him.”
From the front of the office, Carol Reid’s telephone rang.
“Okay, I’m listening,” said Gilbert.
“Shouldn’t we get Carol’s phone?”
“She’s in the Xerox room. She’ll get it.”
“And then you’ll give her the extra lump of coal?” said Lombardo.
“I ask you, why do I have this reputation? I’m one of the kindest homicide detectives I know.”
The two detectives watched Carol walk from the Xerox room to answer her phone. Gilbert felt secretly rankled by the comment but he buried it for now. He knew he sometimes took Carol for granted and made a quick mental note to change his ways. Lombardo continued.
“The Kwons had Tony for only three months,” he said. “Under a year, like you said. But then Tony broke their own child’s arm by pushing her off some monkey bars. Not only that, he was constantly stealing from them. Rose said she finally had to hide her purse.”
“And Tony was only eight?”
“Yep.”
“Some kid.”
“So you know who looked after Tony when he left the Kwons?” asked Lombardo.
“Who?”
> “Are you ready for this?” said Lombardo.
“It’s not like you’re going to tell me the earth is really flat, Joe,” he said. “Get on with it.”
“May Lau did.”
Gilbert paused, long enough to become a devout flat-earther. He made the next bond, like adding a renegade isotope to a heretofore stable and understandable structure.
“In fact,” continued Lombardo, “May Lau looked after Mok for the next eight years.”
Adding family to blood and community, a connection now archetypical of murder; Gilbert should have guessed, should have looked at the lethal molecule from a different angle to discern its predisposing outlines. The discovery was simple and satisfying, like stumbling on a rudimentary mathematical equation to finally explain the exact nature of the universe.
“We really have to check this guy out,” he said. “We’ve got to find him and we’ve got to find him fast, before he takes off somewhere.”
May Lau looked away, her face creasing with unmistakable woe when Gilbert told her they were looking for Tony Mok. Her eyes misted over and she took off her big square glasses. She wore an odd brooch today, a Siamese cat holding a lily in its mouth, and was dressed in black. Though it was only four in the afternoon, the sky was already getting dark and the rain came down like water from a broken dike.
“I haven’t seen Tony in nearly six months,” she said. Her voice sounded faint.
“Had your son seen or talked to him?” asked Gilbert.
“Tony and Edgar weren’t on the best terms,” she said. She looked up at Gilbert, as if challenging Gilbert to understand. “Edgar never really liked Tony when they were growing up. I don’t know when they saw each other last.”
She seemed too spiritually bruised to talk about Tony.
“We have an address for him on Cecil Street, but the place is abandoned, ruined,” said Gilbert.
She nodded, as if she knew about Cecil Street. “I don’t know where he went after Cecil Street,” she said.
Gilbert stared at the torn suit jacket on the coffee table she was mending, a mix of gray and charcoal tweed with the left arm torn off; maybe Edgar’s jacket, maybe something she planned to sell to make a little extra money for herself.
