Fall Guy

by Scott Mackay

  “And you came to the restaurant with Tony Mok?” he asked.

  This was also a name he could use, a way to make her understand he knew about the murder, to imply that his knowledge was far-ranging and potentially damaging, to further unbalance her in her grief and strain. But she recovered. The momentary hysteria left her eyes. And she looked as fun-loving and gamesome as ever.

  “Tony Mok, he a nice guy,” she said.

  He smiled, tried to play the game right along with her. “I’m sure he is,” he said.

  “He not so serious,” she said. “Everybody so serious all the time. You too serious, Barry.”

  He smiled mildly, pretending to be taken with her. She didn’t seem to realize she was trying too hard to be cute.

  “Was Edgar Lau always serious?” he asked.

  He hated to be cruel, but sometimes he knew he had no choice. He knew that lovers argued. He felt sorry for her in her sudden transparency. Her strain and grief came back, and now, at least to his eye, she looked faintly ridiculous, even pathetic, in her poodlelike coat, a poor kid whose mother had dressed her in funny-looking clothes, a woman who in striving for this kinetic retro-funk look had sacrificed some of her own dignity.

  “Why you do this?” she asked. The piquancy was gone from her voice, her tone was leaden, and her emotional barometer had plunged. The plunge was so precipitous, so unexpected, he quickly wrenched her back to what he was really after.

  “Do you have any idea where Tony went when the two of you parted?” he asked. Regardless of who was alone in the apartment with Edgar, Tony, because of the tangible evidence, still had to be found, and found as quickly as possible.

  Pearl looked up, like coming up for air, her Chinese eyes hooded and sweet under their epicanthic lids, her lips pursed to a rosebud, and gazed at him as if from the balcony of a tall building.

  “I meet him later in video arcade,” she said, her voice soft.

  “You did?” said Gilbert.

  She stared at him, as if she were still trying to understand him. Gilbert felt there existed a gulf between them, a cultural demarcation that made any meaningful answers and questions difficult and approximate.

  “We play Samurai Shodown over and over again,” she said. She seemed to brighten a little. “You know that game?”

  “No,” he said. One of the challenges with Pearl, he decided, was to keep her from getting distracted by her own conversation. “Which arcade?”

  “Downtown,” she said. “I always forget name.”

  That didn’t surprise him, considering she was from Hong Kong. “And you had fun?” he asked.

  “Lots and lots of fun,” she said, brightening even more. “Him a riot. All day long I talk, talk, talk, sell, sell, sell. Tony just what a girl need. Him play Samurai Shodown like a pro.”

  “You wouldn’t know where he is now, would you?” asked Gilbert.

  Her brow arched, as if she were giving his question serious thought. Finally she said, “He go this way, he go that way, he moving all the time.”

  Gilbert stopped. She wasn’t going to give him anything. So he tried again to unbalance her. “Edgar loved you,” he said.

  She idly picked some saltwater taffy out of the cut-crystal bowl and put it back. It was as if a veil had been lowered over her face.

  “Edgar so serious all the time,” she said.

  “Was he?”

  “He like to argue.”

  “And do you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “That why I leave early that night. Who know who kill him that night, but it not me. I left. Lot of people see me go.”

  As an alibi, this was ridiculous. He knew it, and she knew it, but she didn’t seem to care.

  “And you met Tony Mok later on? Down at the arcade?”

  “I already tell you that.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I need to talk to Tony.”

  “I tell him.”

  “Will you?”

  She suddenly looked impatient with him. “You go now,” she said. She no longer seemed willing to be gracious under any and all circumstances. “I a tired girl.” She was dismissing him, and he recognized something familiar about the dismissal, an edge to her voice that suggested he shouldn’t argue with money and power, that she was through with humoring him. “I need sleep.” But there was something more to it than just dismissal. She seemed broken in some way, crushed not only by the death of Edgar, but oppressed by the way she had to live, by her role as a trophy wife to an Asian crime lord. “I have many meetings I go to tomorrow.” Beneath her gamesome veneer he now sensed a young woman who had made a mess of her life, who felt trapped by her life. “So you go now.” She gave him a brief acquiescent nod, then looked up at him with pleading eyes. “I call you if I see Tony. I tired.”

  Yes, she was tired. She was exhausted. Exhausted by everything. He felt sorry for her. He didn’t come here meaning to feel sorry for her, but he did. And he decided he wasn’t going to press her. At least not yet. Not until he had another fact or two that might shed some light on why she looked so trapped. So he left, taking his warrant with him, left her to her sad exhaustion and oppressed soul. She could dismiss, she could evade, she could refuse, but she couldn’t hide what he saw in her eyes. And what he saw in her eyes was a thread, a piece of the puzzle, something that connected her to everything, something that, when the time came, she wouldn’t be able to deny.

  Lab techs retrieved usable blood samples from the shoulder harness and headrest of Tony Mok’s Volkswagen Golf, and were quick to match the blood type to Edgar’s blood type. But half the world’s population had Edgar’s blood type. To further individualize the blood required DNA testing, and that meant sending samples to the Center for Forensic Science, near the university, where the backlog was well over a month long.

  “We can’t wait forever,” said Ross Paulsen, not pleased that Tony Mok should become their prime suspect, wishing simply to eliminate Mok by getting DNA results on the blood samples as quickly as possible. “I’m flying to Washington tonight. I have a meeting there tomorrow. I’ll take the samples to our lab, have them work on it around the clock, and fax the results to you Friday morning.”

  Which he did. On Friday morning, as Gilbert read over the results, he thought Paulsen had to be climbing the walls. The blood did indeed belong to Edgar Lau, and gave Gilbert just the evidence he needed to write a viable warrant on Mok, derailing Paulsen’s hope for an indictment against Foster Sung.

  Just before noon that same day, the UNESCO case file on Mok from the Children’s Aid Society arrived. Much of it confirmed what they already knew: that Mok had been born to a single Vietnamese female by the name of Fang, last name unknown; that Fang subsequently died of diphtheria in the refugee camp; and that Foster Sung had then become Mok’s guardian. The case worker’s entries charted Mok’s emigration from Hong Kong to Canada, his placement with the Kwons, and finally his placement with May Lau. An inclination toward delinquency was noted.

  Then came copies of various medical reports—the required documentation immigration officials needed to confirm Mok’s state of health prior to granting the boy landed immigrant status. Among these various reports Gilbert found the results of an unusual blood test, not the standard blood test used to determine hemoglobin, platelet, and white cell counts, but something called a blood phenotype. Blood seemed to be the theme of the day. This particular blood phenotype test had been requisitioned by the Prince of Wales Hospital, a hospital not actually in Metropolitan Hong Kong but in the New Territories. The New Territories were a suburban and rural area north of Hong Kong, far from the refugee camp where Mok had been born. The hospital had farmed out the test to a private lab nearby. The blood phenotype, conducted on the date of Mok’s birth, puzzled Gilbert. Its origin and date suggested Mok might have actually been born in the Prince of Wales Hospital, not in the refugee camp, as May Lau had originally told them. He checked for a hospital birth record but couldn’t find one.

  He phoned Dr. Black
stein at the Coroner’s Building, asked the doctor about Mok’s blood phenotype, and why the test would be performed on a newborn infant.

  “For paternity testing,” said Blackstein.

  “Paternity testing?” asked Gilbert, surprised.

  “That’s right.”

  Gilbert thought about this.

  “Would the parents need blood phenotypes done as well?” asked Gilbert. “In order to get a match?”

  “Yes.”

  Gilbert took a deep breath. This was indeed odd. Why would anybody want to find out who Mok’s real father was when Mok’s mother had fled Vietnam in Foster Sung’s boat all by herself? What possible interest could anybody have? Gilbert once again flipped through the medical reports but found neither a mother’s nor a father’s blood phenotype report.

  “Is there any other reason why a blood phenotype might be performed on a newborn infant?”

  Blackstein paused. “Possibly if the infant had hemolytic disease of the new-born,” he said. “But that’s rare. Trust me, Barry. Your blood phenotype was done for paternity testing, plain and simple.”

  That afternoon, while Lombardo took Detectives Telford, Halycz, and Groves to the suburban Chinatowns in Mississauga and Agincourt, Gilbert went to visit May Lau one more time. He hoped Tony Mok might have contacted her since the night of the murder.

  The rain, having abated for the last few days, now came down as if making up for lost time. She had tea ready for him, scalding and green, in a teapot adorned with red-and-gold dragons. Shopping coupons were spread out on the table, clipped from flyers and sorted into neat piles, a shopping list in ballpoint Cantonese characters beside them. When he told her Tony Mok was their prime suspect she turned away, looking deeply saddened but not particularly surprised. She finally faced Gilbert with a look of resignation in her eyes. She seemed particularly fragile this morning.

  “I wasted a lot of effort on Tony,” she said, “and it was all for nothing.”

  “You’re sure you don’t know any of his friends?” asked Gilbert. “Friends he might stay with?”

  She shook her head. “He had a lot of friends when we lived on First Avenue. But he never kept them for long. He always ended up fighting with them.”

  “Can you remember any of their names?” he asked.

  She stared at her cat. The cat slept on the chair in the corner. But then the cat jerked awake, roused by the sound of banging upstairs. May Lau looked toward the ceiling. Gilbert looked up too. He heard men calling to each other in Cantonese. Then more banging.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Foster’s fixing the ceiling up there,” she said. She frowned. “I wish they wouldn’t shout like that. It carries right through the floor.” She turned to him, doing her best to ignore the banging and shouting. “We used to live in Chinatown East,” she said. “Out by the Don Jail. Tony hung around with a gang of street kids there, just before we moved over here. Rough kids. If he’s in touch with anybody, he’d be in touch with them. But if you’re asking me to remember names…” She shook her head, looking much older than her fifty-four years. “It was such a long time ago.”

  “So Chinatown East,” he said. “And you say you lived on First Avenue?”

  “Over by Logan,” she said. “Right near the railroad tracks.”

  Gilbert thought this over. “Please get in touch with us if you hear from Tony,” he said. He gave her another card in case she’d lost the one Lombardo had given to her.

  “I will,” she said.

  As he went down the stairs into the rain he once again thought about the sound the gunshot had made on the night of the murder. If May Lau could hear the banging and shouting upstairs so easily, why hadn’t she been able to hear the gunshot that had killed her son? And if she had heard the gunshot, why was she now trying to hide it?

  He came back much later, well past ten in the evening, when the windows in May Lau’s apartment were dark. He climbed the stairs to Edgar’s apartment and let himself in with the extra set of keys. He turned on the light.

  With the scene relinquished a number of days ago, any useful evidence from Edgar’s apartment had all but disappeared. But he wasn’t here for evidence. The ceiling was patched with drywall compound, and a fine coating of plaster dust covered the kitchen counter. He was here for confirmation. The blood was gone, as were the slashed futons. The books had been put back on the shelves. He was here for comparisons, compelled by that same instinct which had forced him to take the glove down from the tree. He was here to look at the photograph album again.

  The photograph album had been put away in a box full of others on the bedroom floor. He lifted it out of the box, placed it on the desk, turned on the desk lamp, and found the picture he was looking for, the one of Foster Sung standing on the boat, the nickel-plated semiautomatic stuck down the front of his pants. Gilbert took out his mug shot of Tony Mok. He looked at Mok’s face, then at Sung’s face, then back at Mok’s face. He thought of the blood phenotype performed by the Prince of Wales Hospital, wondered if there might be other records of Tony to be found there. Why hide it, he wondered? If indeed there was anything to hide. He studied the contours of Mok’s cheekbones, then the contours of Sung’s cheekbones. Why go to such elaborate lengths to blur the facts? Or was Gilbert just being a desperate detective? He looked at the picture of Ying and Edgar on the yellow Honda in Saigon pinned askew on the bulletin board. He looked at Ying’s eyes, then at Mok’s eyes, then at Ying’s eyes again. Was there anything there, he wondered?

  He shook his head.

  Nothing was sadder than a desperate detective.

  Sixteen

  Lombardo, Groves, Telford, and Halycz recanvassed not only the suburban Chinatowns but the inner-city ones as well. Lombardo got Lucky with Danny Leung again, the pai-gow operator out by the Don Jail, who now knew where Tony Mok might be hiding—a converted factory just off First Avenue in the heart of Chinatown East. Gilbert got Judge Dave Lembeck to sign an arrest warrant based on the blood and bullet evidence found in Mok’s car. With the warrant on Mok signed, Gilbert and Lombardo moved in on Chinatown East. Neither of them were surprised that Mok should choose this particular community to hide in. Having been raised here as a boy, Mok no doubt felt safest here.

  Chinatown East nestled on the slopes of the Don Valley. Chief landmarks in the area included the Don Jail, the Riverdale Palliative Care Hospital, and the Riverdale Public Library. Here in the center of Chinatown East, the King and Gerrard streetcars creaked and moaned through the constantly busy intersection at Broadview. The night sky pelted rain. The shops were dirty, plastered with Chinese posters, and packed closely together. As Gilbert and Lombardo turned left onto Gerrard, Gilbert read some of the shop names: Hoi Toi Salon, Sun Hao Food Market, Best of China Herbs Market. He saw a Chinese man in denims riding an old Monarch bicycle through the rain, a big basket of dried salt cod tied to the handlebars. Nearly all the pedestrians were Chinese. This was more of a real Chinatown than the Chinatown downtown was. The downtown Chinatown was a tourist attraction, a place for white people to buy trinkets from the East, find cheap produce, and eat dim sum. Chinatown East could have been a neighborhood in Shanghai—there were hardly any white people anywhere.

  “Up here on the right,” said Lombardo. “Boulton.”

  Gilbert turned right on Boulton.

  They came to a small red brick factory; it looked as if it had been built in the 1920s. To the right stood the Que Ling Seafood Restaurant, a dilapidated white clapboard structure with a green shingle roof and a faded bristol-board sign in the window advertising fresh lobster and shrimp. To the left, an alley ran west along the side of the old factory. Across the street stood Eastdale Collegiate Institute, Mok’s old high school.

  “How do you want to work this?” asked Lombardo. “There’s a buzzer at the front door and an automatic lock.”

  Gilbert looked at the door, a big glass one leading into a small foyer. “Let’s wait awhile, see if he comes out,” he s
aid.

  “A regular stakeout then?” said Lombardo.

  “I think so. We’ll duck into the school parking lot here. We’ll have a perfect line of sight.”

  Gilbert drove into the parking lot, did a three-point turn, and eased under a leafless chestnut tree. He turned off the headlights but left the windshield wipers going so they could see better.

  “Should we call our backup yet?” asked Lombardo.

  “No point until we actually see him,” said Gilbert.

  He stared at the front of the factory. An odd facade, with a big aluminum garage door right in the middle of the front wall, painted with flaking brown paint, bent in spots. Windows lined the second floor. The structure had a flat roof. Gilbert wondered if there was any way to get up onto the roof from the inside, a way that Mok might escape. With the buildings so close together in Chinatown East, he wasn’t looking forward to a roof chase, even if the uniforms did most of the chasing.

  “See those two doors down there at the side of the building next to each other?” said Gilbert.

  “Yeah?”

  “He’ll use one of those if he makes a break for it,” said Gilbert.

  “Strange, the way they put those doors right together like that,” said Lombardo.

  “One’s the fire exit for the first floor, the other’s the fire exit for the second floor,” said Gilbert. “Quaint old building.”

  “You call that quaint?” asked Lombardo. “With all those garbage bags out front? And those two old sofas? I don’t call it quaint. I call it a dump.”