Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  He reparked the car between the lines, replaced the chrome strip on the door, then left the tape in the tape deck, locked safely inside the newly orphaned Mercedes.

  When he went back up to the office, he was approached by the office manager, a narrow, hawk-faced man with a perennial scowl. "It would really help us if you could find out what happened to your brother's secretary. Pres confided only in her, and frankly, she's got to get in here and untangle some of this mess. There are arrangements, details only Angie knows about. Pay-out schedules, court calendar dates ... I know it's a horrible time, but some of these situations won't wait."

  "I'm ... I don't really know how I can help," Wheeler said, wanting to get the hell away. Being in this place where his brother had mounted his successful rise to power on the very day of his death was unsettling. It was as if Pres's spirit hadn't quite left yet.

  Hearing Pres's voice on the tape had only made this feeling worse.

  "If you could just go out there, we'd really appreciate it," the office manager pressed. "I'd go myself, but I'm trying to deal with half-a-dozen things right now. This has really knocked us sideways."

  Wheeler wanted to get out of the office and still be able to tell his mother he had helped out, so he reluctantly accepted the assignment. Angie Wong's address was in Torrance, California.

  Where the fuck is Torrance, anyway?

  It was off the 110, south of the airport. The houses were small, wood-frame jobs, most with neatly trimmed gardens. Angie Wong lived at 2467 Clarkson Street.

  When he pulled up, he could see a red Toyota in the driveway. He got out, walked across the neatly trimmed grass, then rang the front-door chimes. They were just like the ones at his grandmother's house in Baldwin Park. He vaguely remembered standing on his grandparents' porch as a child, maybe only three years old, ringing the doorbell of their huge old white Spanish mansion, then running to hide every time they came to answer, until his grandparents finally stood on the porch and begged him to stop. What a jokester. Wheeler was driving his family nuts even before he could shit sitting down.

  Nobody opened Angie's front door, so he walked around to the back. There he found another strange thing. The back door had been jimmied. The wood door had been pried, leaving a deep hash mark by the lock. The door was ajar.

  Wheeler pushed it open with the flat of his hand and walked into a very small kitchen. He could tell the place had been searched, even before he got all the way inside. He moved slowly through the disheveled house and found that, from one room to the next, things had been strewn everywhere. He called out for Angie, but there was no answer. The last door he saw led to the basement. He turned on the light and moved cautiously down the wooden stairs.

  The basement room was a small gym with mirrors on the walls.

  Angie Wong was reflected in most of them.

  Her dead body was tied down on the workout bench. It was naked and bleeding. The corpse was covered with cuts. With hundreds and hundreds of incisions, the dead woman had been mutilated and bloodily desecrated. Her flesh was riddled and had retracted. The cuts had puckered and now oozed. Angie glistened red. Her eyes were open, her cut-up mouth fixed in a silent scream. It didn't look like her tongue was still in there. On her stomach was placed a framed picture of a young Chinese man, maybe about thirty years old.

  Vat 69 was a damn good Scotch, but it was a lot smoother going down than coming up. It spewed on the carpet and all over his Spanish shoes. It stained his shirt and floppy linen trousers.

  Rimshot. Another Wheeler Cassidy masterpiece.

  Chapter 5.

  Tanisha and Kenetta

  It was the second new moon after the winter solstice, which was February 9--Chinese New Year.

  Ray Fong and A1 Katsukura didn't want to drive all the way out to fucking Torrance, because they had plans to celebrate. Al, of course, was Japanese, but never passed on any drinking holiday, regardless of its ethnic origin, so they reluctantly gave the squeal to Tanisha Williams.

  The homicide dick at the scene thought the killing looked ritual and wanted somebody in LAPD Asian Crimes to take a look. The vie was Chinese, or so they thought. She was so cut up it was hard to tell.

  Ray moved across the linoleum floor in the run-down fifth-floor rented office that housed Asian Crimes and dropped the green slip on Tanisha's desk. She was on the phone, trying to talk Mandarin Chinese to someone. It was pathetic, but at least she was making the effort. Ray Fong was good in that dialect, almost fluent, but he didn't help her because he'd been told by Internal Affairs to leave her alone. Everyone had.

  Tanisha Williams, known to her friends as Tisha, was departmental poison. She had been parked up here by I. A. D., and everybody knew a Black female had no chance of conducting a successful "field shake" on an Asian male. Asians didn't trust other racial groups, especially Blacks. Being female just made it worse, no matter how trim her body or how beautiful and smooth her coffee-colored complexion. Nonetheless, Ray had to respect her, because as soon as she had been assigned there, she immediately went to work to learn the terrain. The first day she had checked out an armload of library books on the many Asian cultures, and she had been reading constantly, even during lunch. It was almost as if she didn't know she was supposed to be up on blocks while the I. A. Shooflies crawled around under her career, looking for wet spots. I. A. had taken her off the LAPD Crash Unit because, as a teenager, before joining the Department, she had been associating with Crip gang members in the neighborhood. They now suspected she was giving up her investigations to old gang-banger boyfriends. The Crash Unit worked the Black gangs in South Central and Tanisha had grown up in that hood. Her grandmother, niece, and nephew still lived there, south of Manchester, and she visited them on her old turf during her days off.

  Tanisha hung up the phone and cocked her eyebrow as she picked up the greenie.

  "One eighty-seven in Torrance, Asian woman hit the slab. The lab techs are already rolling. It's all yours," Ray said and moved back to his desk. The address was 2467 Clarkson Street.

  She grabbed her sweater and her purse and left before they changed their minds.

  Tanisha got in her Department-authorized P. O. V. (Personally Owned Vehicle), which was parked across the street from the rented fifties building on Hill Street in downtown L. A. where the Asian Crimes Task Force was officed. ACTF was located miles from the steel-and-glass efficiency of Parker Center. The unit had been an orphan division from inception. It had been formed by Chief Redden in the mid-sixties as a political unit to deal with the problem of rising Asian crime in Los Angeles. Back then, the actual criminal investigations had been done by regular detectives out of Parker Center, the Asian detectives on ACTF spent most of their time explaining American police tactics to wary Asian groups at specially arranged Department lunches. Gradually, with the rising tide of politically correct thinking, their charter was expanded and now they handled all Asian CAPs--Crimes Against People, which included the whole gory smorgasbord of human atrocities: rape, theft, assault, child abuse, and murder.

  The reason Tanisha left so quickly was that for the six weeks she'd been on the Asian Crimes Task Force, this was the first greenie anybody had handed her. She knew it was because Ray, Al, and the other on-duty Asian cops were trying to slip out early for Chinese New Year, and the murder in Torrance threatened to be an all-nighter. She coaxed her rusted-out yellow Mazda up 6th Street on her way to the Harbor Freeway. When it was cold, the little Japanese bumblebee chugged and spit like a cat coughing up a furball.

  The Harbor Freeway took her through her old neighborhood in South Central, where she had once been a student at Martin Luther King High School. She knew that the I. A. dicks were now down there, crawling through her personal history, talking to all the people she had grown up with.

  She'd been told by her friends in the hood that I. A. had even tailed Li'l Evil. He was her last homeboy lover from almost fifteen years ago and was an O. G. (Original Gangster) in the neighborhood Crip set. He took over w
hen C. went upstate. Monster C., another old friend, was back in the brickhouse at Lompoc, doing a long bit.

  Kenetta had died in Li'l Evil's arms, not two blocks from where she was now driving.

  She thought about her little sister. Blood gurgling up through the huge 9mm hole in her five-year-old chest. Tanisha, just sixteen then, standing over her, screaming hysterically, unable to process what she was seeing, unable to do anything as her baby sister died in her boyfriend's arms. There were three paybacks after that, including six people who died because of her little sister: three from her neighborhood Crip crew, two from the Rolling Sixties, who her homies thought (though they weren't sure) had busted the cap at Li'l Evil that mistakenly killed Kenetta. The last victim of that useless violent exchange was another innocent bystander, a sixty-year-old grandmother who obligingly stepped in front of a thirty-ought-six hollow-point Devastator and inadvertently saved the life of a Rolling Sixties banger named Russell "Hardcore" Hayes.

  Tanisha had never joined the gang, because her mother, Lilly, made her promise she would never start Crippin'. Her mother's dream for her was that Tanisha would go to beauty school and open her own hair salon. Tanisha bought the dream, and despite their poverty-level existence, she grew up with solid middle-class values, believing, despite the evidence, that anybody could succeed in America. A belief that distanced her from schoolmates who grew up with desolate views of the future. This difference between Tanisha and her classmates caused her to become a social outcast. As she thought back on it in later years, she realized it was probably the reason she had started dating Li'l Evil, who was a Crip ghetto star. . . . Their romance gave her position in her neighborhood, but it had culminated with the drive-by shooting. A bullet intended for Li'l Evil had ended Kenetta's life. The guilt she felt because of that was overpowering, and still influenced her life.

  Back then, Tanisha's nickname was "Rings." In her first twenty years, nineteen people she knew well had died from street actions. The last and most devastating being her own little sister. After Kenetta died, Tanisha had forgotten her dream of beauty school and had shocked everybody she knew when she joined the LAPD. Her goal was to somehow make up for Kenetta's death-- but no matter what she did or how hard she tried, she had been subtly dissed by the Department. It was almost as if because she'd been born in South Central, she could never be anything more than "Rings" Williams, a sly sixteen-year-old homegirl. It didn't matter that after Kenetta died, she'd gotten straight A's in high school.. .

  didn't matter that she'd enrolled in junior college and transferred to U. C. L. A. to finish her degree in criminology. She was marked by her beginnings. No matter how much they said they respected her journey, they really didn't. It was all hoo-rah.

  When things went bad, her grandmother used to say: "Can't kill nothin' an' won't nothin' die." And that was what her new life on the LAPD felt like. Because she refused to stop going down to South Central to visit her family they distrusted her. And then, because she wouldn't let Lieutenant Hawley at the Crash Unit jump her bones, she was facing a full-scale I. A. D. investigation. Lieutenant Darnel Hawley, who wore his black skin like a preacher's coat but couldn't take the fact that she didn't want to sleep with him. Now, rather than face her on a daily basis after she rejected him, he'd decided to get rid of her, charging her with leaking confidential case-related information to old homies. He didn't have any evidence, so he couldn't suspend her. As a result, she had been banished to Asian Crimes, where she was now trying, without luck, to talk suspicious Asians into communicating with her.

  Now, because of Chinese New Year, she had finally caught a squeal. She looked down at the clipboard where the green slip fluttered in the breeze from the open window. She wondered what she would find at 2467 Clarkson.

  "Whose vomit is this?" Tanisha asked a lab tech. "Is this the vic's puke? This smells like booze."

  Cindy Masatomi was a Japanese forensic scientist who worked for the LAPD Crime Lab. She was in a blue hospital jumpsuit with paper slippers and headgear. Tanisha had worked a few cases with her when she'd still been on Crash.

  "Belongs to the guy outside ... the good-looking one who found the body."

  Tanisha nodded. She'd seen him when she came in. He was dressed like a golf pro, leaning against a new red Jag like he owned the neighborhood. She had already made a cursory check of the body and instantly knew that she was looking at a punishment kill. Punishment and a warning. The person being warned here was the thirty-year-old Chinese man in the picture on top of the victim's body. It was a Triad message. A picture placed on a body meant: "You're going to get this next." She'd been reading about this stuff now for almost six months. Some of these Asian gangs, like the Bamboo Dragons and the Ghost Shadows, made her old neighborhood set seem quaint by comparison. The corpse was probably the homeowner, Angie Wong. The body was too mutilated for anybody to make a visual ID, but dental records and prints should nail it. One strange thing: On her forehead, in Magic Marker, was written "1414." She didn't know what that meant. She'd never seen it before. The body looked fresh, no lividity, no rigor, no insect infestation. She had already asked Cindy for a T. O. D. estimate, which the lab tech would do with a liver thermometer. After she rolled the corpse, Cindy would drive the pointed thermometer down into the liver, which was a chemical factory and the hottest organ in the body, usually 102 degrees. It cooled about a degree an hour. They could estimate time of death by rate of temperature loss.

  Tanisha wondered if there was a Death Doll anywhere. The Chinese Bamboo gangs were big on death symbols. It wasn't enough to just kill you, they had to scare the piss out of you first. The Death Doll was often used as one way to do this, the picture on the corpse was another.

  She knew there wasn't much she could do with the crime scene until the lab techs finished with the body, did a hair and fiber scan, and bagged the vic's hands. She went outside and started digging around in a residential Dumpster out back. She had her head down in the metal container, trying to move an old box of cereal out of the way, when she heard:

  "What're you doing?"

  She jerked her head out of the trash and was looking at the man who had found the body. The residue of vomit on his shirt and linen pants confirmed him as the upchucker who had hurled all over her crime scene.

  She got a better look at him now. Her immediate impression was that she'd seen him before, that she knew him from somewhere and he'd pissed her off, but beyond that, she couldn't place him. Up close, he looked like he thought that even with vomit all over him, he was still somehow totally irresistible. Maybe her reaction to him was chemical or maybe she was just horribly upset at the sight of the dead woman cut to ribbons, but she instantly took a dislike to the handsome man standing in front of her. She put on her police poker-face and addressed him with cold departmental politeness.

  "You want to step back? This is a crime scene," she said and watched as he looked for a place to stand. "Over there," she commanded and pointed to a spot on the driveway. She followed him over and took out a notebook and pen.

  "I'm Detective Williams, LAPD Asian Crimes Task Force. You're the one who found the body, is that correct?"

  He nodded.

  "What's your name?"

  "Wheeler Cassidy," he said, his voice soft in the cold February night.

  "Wheeler? Is that a nickname?"

  "It's a family name. My great-grandfather, on my mother's side, was Jefferson Prescott Wheeler the Third. He was a Confederate General, 27th Richmond Regiment."

  "Write down your address, please, and a number where you can be reached," she said and handed him her notepad and pen. He wrote down his address in Bel Air and his phone number.

  "Why did you come over here, Mr. Cassidy?" she asked.

  "Miss Wong was my brother's secretary. She didn't report to work and the office asked if I would come over here and check on her. My brother was a lawyer in Century City."

  "Was a lawyer? Past tense?"

  "He died last night, at his desk. And M
iss Wong didn't come in this morning. The people in Prescott's law firm got concerned."

  "Prescott . . . that's your brother?"

  He nodded.

  "How did your brother die?"

  "I don't think it has anything to do with this," Wheeler said.

  "Let me do the thinking, Mr. Cassidy. Tell me how he died."

  "Heart attack. At least that's what the L. A. cops said."

  "Prescott Cassidy was his whole name?" She wrote it down.

  "Yes. Well, no. Prescott Westlake Sheridan Cassidy was his complete name." Off her look of disbelief, he added, "Southern names--they're calculated to piss people off."

  She wrote it down. Then her gaze dropped and from this new angle out on the driveway, she saw a box behind the Dumpster she'd been digging in. A wood crate. The top was off and lying beside it. She moved over and looked down. Inside the crate was a small white paper doll about ten inches tall. "There it is," she said.

  He had followed her to the box despite her instruction to stay back, and now he started to reach down and get it for her. She stopped him. "Don't touch it. The lab techs go nuts when you do that."

  "Oh," he said and they both stood looking at it.

  "What is it?"

  "Death Doll. It was probably delivered a day or two ago. That's what I was looking for. It confirms this as a Chinese gang murder. You get a doll like this, it says you're going to die. Usually in a terribly violent way. Some Chinese who've received these just go out and commit suicide rather than wait for the inevitable."

  "If what they do to you is like what happened to Angie Wong, I don't blame them."

  "That's a ritual slaying called the Death of a Thousand Cuts. It's a Triad kill, also called Death by a Myriad of Swords." She was showing off for him now. She wondered why she was even making the effort. "The victim was kept alive while all of her main muscles and tendons were severed, in particular the calves, thighs, forearms, and biceps."

  "Jeezus," Wheeler said, his expression darkening.