Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Will you teach me how to throw a football, Wheel?"

  "Will you get her to go out with me?"

  (iWill you destroy everything I stood for?"

  "Would you? Could you? Should you?"

  Chapter 15.

  Tea Money

  Using latex gloves, Tanisha made a copy of the tape from Prescott's Mercedes on her home recorder. She typed a transcript of it on a groaning Selectric typewriter that had a sticking ball element. Then she left her cluttered Baldwin Park apartment and headed to Parker Center, where she left the original tape off at Symbols and Hieroglyphics with instructions to have it dusted and then analyzed. The Cryptology unit was in the neon-lit, white-walled basement at Parker Center. It had a computer link with the FBI, which had a large database on numerology and cryptology patterns. Tanisha had read up on cryptanalysis deprogramming at the Academy and knew that certain letters in the English language appear more frequently. It is possible to assign a frequency index to each of the twenty-six letters in the alphabet. By keying on this, a number could get assigned a letter. The problem was that the sample in Prescott's dictation was pitifully small. It would be a slow, tedious process, without much chance of success. She also put in a request to find out what the significance of 1414 might be.

  She filled out the paperwork and returned to Asian Crimes to check in. She ran her magnetized I. D. card through the slot. The door lock clicked and she entered; then she took the old elevator up to the eighth floor and walked out into an empty squad room. It was six P. M. She hadn't been at her desk long when A1 Katsukura entered carrying a surprisingly thick case folder which she assumed was Ray's murder investigation. Thick folders didn't necessarily mean progress. They just meant the Department had thrown a lot of "blue" at the investigation and twenty cops were out interviewing everybody within a mile of the crime. A1 moved to his desk, glancing up at her without giving her much expression. It was obvious he didn't want her to come over, so she got up and moved to his desk.

  "Did you get an address on China Boy?" she asked.

  His expression seemed to say, Gimme a break here. Then A1 glanced at the Watch Commander's office. Captain Verba's blinds were still pulled. "I thought you had your Internal Affairs hearing tomorrow."

  "Nobody told me," she said, and no one had, but that didn't surprise her. They would probably spring it on her. She had met with her police union legal adviser once, but since Tanisha was only guilty of visiting her grandmother's house and getting her hair done in South Central, they had decided to go to the hearing and find out what was being alleged before mounting a defense.

  "Did you get an address?" she asked A1 again.

  "Look, Tanisha, you're supposed to pull off this."

  "I'm just interested. Ray was a friend. We were working together. Don't freeze me out, Al. I just want scuttlebutt."

  After a minute, the Japanese detective nodded. "Okay, but you didn't hear it from me. The address on Bobby Chin's arrest file was bogus, but it looks like Ray got lucky on a field shake before he died. A restaurant in Chinatown where Bobby Chin once worked had an address. They told Ray where Bobby really lived. It musta been yesterday afternoon, shortly after he left your house."

  "He sure got there quick," she said.

  "Ray had great contacts in Chinatown. Anyway, the address they gave him was an old metal fishing barge tied at a dredging dock down at the marina. We rolled on the place. The barge was a rat hole--hot, no toilets, but empty. Everybody had left. It'd been used to house a lot of people. It stank like nothing you ever smelled. Old chicken bones, piss in mayonnaise jars, a real Third World jackpot. I've got half the off-duty guys canvassing the two blocks down there by the docks . . . it's all commercial boat yards. So far, nobody saw Ray or his car Thursday night, before his murder."

  "My guess is, after the restaurant gave him the address, he probably went there," she said. "Something happened ... he saw something or somebody, or got something. Then he got tailed back to the Chin Lo headquarters off Hill Street and one of the Chinese O. G. S did him." A1 Katsukura nodded, without commenting. "You know anybody at I. N. S. who'll pass a scratch and sniff test?" she added.

  "Tisha, leave it alone. Verba's gonna go tits-up if he catches you messing with this."

  "Is that a 'no,' Al?"

  "Stay off it. We're gonna cover all those angles. Don't freelance the investigation--you'll just fuck things up."

  Solid advice from a seasoned professional, but not what she intended to do. He looked up at her, his jaw set. His information window had just slammed shut. She moved back to her desk, picked up her stuff, and went back to the L. A. Public Library. She'd decided to find out more about the Chin Lo Triad.

  That night at home, she went through half-a-dozen new books and printouts she had found. At almost midnight, she was deep into a report written by somebody named Willard G. Vickers, who was head of a private think tank called the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center in Cleveland. She had found him in the Nexis computer at the library when she cross-referenced the Chin Lo Triad with U. S. crime. He had been to Washington half-a-dozen times to testify before both the U. S. House of Representatives and the Senate. She had printed out his Congressional testimony and was hardly able to believe what he had told Congress under oath.

  According to Mr. Willard G. Vickers, the Chinese crime syndicates were mostly located in the Fukienese-speaking communities of Asia, which included parts of mainland China, all of Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The Triads were responsible for staggering amounts of crime in the United States. It was a criminal conspiracy, he said, being orchestrated at the highest level of the Chinese government in Beijing. According to Vickers's estimates, the combined Chinese Triad criminal take in the United States had escalated from eighty billion in 1994 to over three hundred billion dollars a year. He had told the startled Joint Committee on Organized Crime that the Chinese Triads had managed to infiltrate all areas of our business and political life, removing this huge sum from our economy by importing three illegal commodities--drugs, guns, and illegal immigrants--and by exporting counterfeit intellectual properties, securities, and stolen goods. The double whammy was that while stealing billions, they were simultaneously poisoning our country with Chinese criminal activity.

  Chinese "cutouts" or front men, he told Congress, had infiltrated the political spectrum in America, bribing government officials and investing illegally in political campaigns, right up to the President of the United States. These intermediaries had become rich and powerful, and had curried political favor and influence. When she read that, Tanisha remembered what Kay Cassidy had said in the hospital about Prescott's political clout. She wondered if Prescott Cassidy was a "cutout."

  Vickers testified that this huge theft from our country had gone virtually unreported and unprosecuted. He went on for pages, talking about how the Chinese crime problem completely overshadowed the American Mafia and Colombian drug cartels, taking easily five times the combined amount of those two criminal enterprises annually.

  According to Vickers, the surprising, unprecedented rebound of heroin use in the United States was due almost entirely to Chinese efforts. China was the largest producer of heroin, growing inland poppies like no other nation on earth. Since it was a cheap commodity in China and worth billions in the United States, the Chinese had imported it without much U. S. government interference and had priced it to undercut the Latin American cocaine cowboys. This had caused a flood of "China White" into U. S. schools and inner cities. The Chinese drug lords had set up pipelines that were now feeding America tons of pure heroin annually.

  Vickers told Congress about illegal immigration, saying that in California alone, the Triads were responsible for smuggling over a hundred thousand people a year into that beleaguered state, without almost any prosecutions--an astounding feat. The Chin Lo Triad in Hong Kong shipped these non-English-speaking peasants halfway around the world, fed them, housed them, clothed them, and supplied them with false documentation ... all right under the
noses of U. S. government agencies chartered to protect us from this very penetration. Obviously, he concluded, this couldn't happen without people in those agencies looking the other way. Even more devastating was that many of these illegal immigrants sold themselves to the Triads in return for passage. In order to pay the Triads back, they turned to crime in the United States. "The problem of Chinese crime," he told a shocked Congress, "escalated dramatically since 1994, the Chinese Year of the Dog."

  As Tanisha Williams read all of this, her level of skepticism rose. How could this be true? Willard G. Vickers broke the crimes down by category: Weapons smuggling netted over five billion a year; theft of luxury automobiles, yachts, and consumer goods netted around twelve billion; counterfeit currency, credit cards, access devices, trademarked goods, and securities over one hundred billion; intellectual properties in the growing computer field close to a hundred billion; illegal trading in stock market commodities another two billion; illegal immigration ten billion. The list was staggering. Yet, none of this was even hinted at in the press. Nothing had been said about it on Capitol Hill or in the White House. The reason for this, he had told a silent Congress, was self-evident. It was because of "Tea Money," which, he explained, was what Asians called government bribes.

  She had never heard any of this discussed at the Asian Crimes Task Force. They all knew that Asian crime was on the rise, but how could it be this pervasive unless the majority of it was going unreported? She finally put down the printout.

  Either Willard G. Vickers was crazy as a street-corner Jesus, or this was the biggest, best-run criminal conspiracy on the face of the globe. She was determined to find out which it was.

  She woke him up at four A. M. She could hear him muttering and fumbling with the latches on the other side of the door of the beautiful tenth-floor Bel Air condo that overlooked the country club on Bellagio Road.

  Finally, the door opened and Wheeler was standing there in surgical greens and no shirt, leaning on one crutch. His hair was mussed. He looked like a Calvin Klein ad for hospital wear.

  "You have interesting technique, Detective," he said, glancing at his Rolex watch.

  "May I come in, Mr. Cassidy?" she asked.

  He nodded and hopped out of her way as she moved into his beautifully color-coordinated, antique-laden penthouse. He flipped on a few lights in the entry hall and followed her into the living room, where she was looking out the balcony window to the golf course below.

  "This is nice," she said, thinking of her own cluttered railroad flat in Baldwin Park.

  "Right," he said, leaning on the crutch, studying her.

  "I need your help," she finally said.

  "You've already got my mother climbing the drapes," he said slowly. "She's not used to being told to report to the police station to be interviewed on a homicide."

  "That wasn't me," Tanisha said. "Not that I don't agree. Your brother was murdered. Maybe he let something slip. Maybe he told her or his wife something. Tell your mother to stop fighting and help us. We're not challenging her or accusing her. We're trying to solve her son's murder."

  Wheeler decided not to tell her that his mother had no interest in cooperating.

  "I've been taken off your brother's case," she said, "and off of Angela Wong's."

  "Why's that?"

  "I'm undergoing a probe into my background by my superiors."

  "I like you better already."

  "Mr. Cassidy, I think I may be on to something. I'm not sure exactly how much weight to give it, but I need to go to Cleveland and check it out."

  "So you decided to come here at four in the morning to keep me informed?" he said, cocking an eye at her skeptically.

  "I need to borrow the airfare. It's four hundred, round-trip. The Department won't cover it, and I don't have it, but if I'm right, it might help solve your brother's murder. I can pay you back at the end of the month."

  "You wanna borrow four hundred dollars?"

  "It's just a loan. I figure you want this solved. I'll sign over the pink slip on my Mazda as collateral."

  "I can hardly wait to get behind the wheel of that little wheezing bumblebee." He moved to the bar, took down a beveled crystal glass, and, using silver tongs, dropped two ice cubes into it. They rang as they hit the fine Baccarat. Then he picked up the Vat 69 and splashed a liberal dose into the glass. "Anything I can fix you?" he asked.

  "No," she said, moving away from the window.

  "Why Cleveland?" he asked.

  "Police business. I need to check out a source."

  "If it's really police business, I wouldn't have to pay for it. Besides, didn't you just say you weren't on the case anymore?"

  He took a big swallow from the glass as she looked down at the carpet.

  "Something wrong?" he asked, picking up her look.

  "No."

  "He was my brother, and I do want to find out why he was murdered. But if I'm going to loan you the four hundred, you need to tell me why," he said, and watched as she struggled with it for a minute.

  "I think your brother was a 'cutout' for the Chin Lo Triad, a powerful Chinese criminal organization. A 'cutout' is a money conduit, usually handling payoffs to politicians or agencies like the I. N. S. They're used so the Chinese government, or in this case the Triad behind the bribes, doesn't get identified. It's possible Prescott was handling political payoffs in America to facilitate Chinese criminal activity. It was probably no accident that his secretary was Chinese. I think, among other things, she was his interpreter. I've been checking her background. Angela Wong was born in Fukien Province, which happens to be the province where the Chin Lo Triad originated. She was fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fukienese, as well as several rare dialects like Hakka, Chin Chow, and Hoi Ping."

  "You already said you thought he was doing payoffs this afternoon. What's so different now?"

  "This evening I read about a man in Cleveland who runs the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center, on Asian crime. He sounds like the best expert in the field. I think he may be able to fill in some pieces."

  "Why don't you just call him?"

  "This guy knows all about the Chin Lo Triad and other Chinese criminal organizations. He has research materials, a computer database, but . . . he may also be a problem. I need to get a look at him."

  "A problem?"

  "I got his personal profile out of the computer. He's a disbarred lawyer, a radical in the sixties. A long-haired, bomb-throwing, William Kunstler-type liberal. He's also been busted a buncha times for possession, mostly ganja."

  "Terrific . . ."

  "But he's an acknowledged expert on Chinese crime who's testified three times before Congress."

  "And you can't call him?"

  "I could, but if he's a flake, I need to be looking at him to make that judgment."

  He took another huge gulp of Scotch, draining the glass. He turned back to the bar and refilled it. This time when he turned back, he caught her scowling. "My drinking bothers you?"

  "You don't drink, Mr. Cassidy, you guzzle. Ever think about backing off a little?"

  "I ... no. I . . ." Then he set the refilled glass down. "I want to know why you're doing this," he said. "If you're off the case, why don't you leave it alone?"

  She didn't say anything, but glared at him in frustration.

  "You're asking me to help destroy my brother's reputation. What's your motive? Why are you doing this? Is Pres going to get a fair shake here?"

  She studied him in the dim light, next to the bar. She couldn't see his eyes, which were cast in deep shadow. "I'm doing it because of Ray Fong. He was my partner. He was murdered. I have an obligation to him."

  "Bullshit."

  "Bullshit?"

  "Yeah, bullshit. I watched you and Detective Fong at the hospital. I've seen more cooperation at bankruptcy hearings. You guys had nothing."

  "You're a mind reader, too?"

  "I'm a shrewd observer of people, especially women. It's how I get laid. You didn't reall
y like Ray Fong. You were tolerating him. Sort of like you tolerate me. So what's in this for you?"

  Of course he was right, but she couldn't tell him her real reason. She couldn't admit that to fail now would effectively end a ten-year journey. Even though her stay on the LAPD had not been what she had planned, she couldn't admit the mistake. At least not yet. This desperate attempt to solve a red-ball double homicide would be her way of saying they were wrong. They should have taken her more seriously.

  "For now, let's leave it at friendship for Ray, even if you think it's bullshit," she said.

  "Then I'm going to have to go with you."

  "I won't be needing any help."

  "You think my brother may have been involved in something criminal. . . . My mother is about to cut me off. If I help you and she finds out, I'll be hanging on the fence at the estate sale. I've got a lot at stake. But most important, I've promised myself I'd try to find out who killed Prescott. It's very important to me. But I'm not sure of your motives, Detective Williams, and since I don't know where you're aimed, I'm coming with you or you can get the money somewhere else."

  "That's crazy."

  "Maybe so, but I don't want my little brother framed for something he didn't do."

  Chapter 16.

  The Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center

  They arrived in Cleveland at four-thirty in the afternoon. They had no luggage, so they moved directly out of the terminal. Tanisha put her cellphone on "Roam," and while Wheeler looked for a cab, she dialed the Cryptology unit of the LAPD. She got hold of Mark Watson, a bespectacled scientific technocrat who displayed an absolute absence of personality. At least she'd never detected one.

  "Nothing we can break," he told her after she asked how they were proceeding. "Looks like a key book code, and without the key book, we can't decipher it."

  She asked how a key book code worked.

  "It's one of the easiest to use and hardest to crack," he sighed. "It was developed by the Germans and used by spies during World War II. The way it works, both parties in the communication have to know the book. Then you simply use any page number of the book and count to the letter you need on that page. For instance, if you're looking for a W, you turn to any page, let's say 22, and then count to the first W. Let's say it's the fifteenth letter on the page ... so the first letter is 22-15. I'm pretty sure that's what Prescott Cassidy was using. We aren't going to be able to break it without knowing the book. Sorry," he said. He sounded like he was in a hurry to get off the phone.