The Untimely Death Box Set

by James Kipling

  “How can I refuse such a request?” Master Chu told him. “Please accept the staff as a gift from my family. I will inform the man who carved it why it is no longer here and let him decided whether or not to contact you for compensation.”

  Yuan and his cousins bowed very low to Master Chu and left the warehouse. When they were driving away in Yuan’s SUV, his cousin Greg took out the staff and looked at it.

  “All that for one lousy staff?” He said. “Yuan, sometimes I wonder what comes over you.”

  The next day, Yuan took the staff over to Doc Stanford at his laboratory. He met the old medical examiner at his office and handed him the stick. Stanford picked it up and looked it over with keen interest.

  “What’s this?” he asked Yuan. “It looks like a rattan cane. Do you think that this was used as the murder weapon?”

  Yuan pointed out the stains on the carved areas of the staff and asked Stanford what he thought about them. “Looks like blood stains to me, Doc. When you’ve seen plenty of them, they start to look familiar. Is there a way we can test it?”

  “I can do a quick test in my lab,” he told him. “Let’s take it over there.”

  They walked down the halls of the building that housed his laboratory. When they reached the lab, Stanford put on his lab coat and latex gloves. He sat the staff of rattan on his lab bench and began looking it over to determine where the best places to test it might be located. The older man placed a small drop of something on one of the stains and nodded.

  “Test positive,” he told Yuan, “now we need to take it over to the crime scene lab and let them do a DNA sequence with the samples taken from the victims. They should have those on file.

  “How long will it take?” Yuan asked him.

  “They can have it done in less than twenty-four hours. It all depends on how much of a sample they can take from the staff and how long it takes them to isolate the DNA. I’m thinking it shouldn’t take too long since the bare rattan acted like a sponge and sucked up the blood when it splattered on it. I would expect more blood, but I bet our killer was smart enough to wrap the striking edge in duct tape to prevent blood from direct contact.”

  Yuan signed it over to Doc Stanford and left the office. He drove directly back to the ninth district’s station house and met with his partner.

  The spent the afternoon comparing notes. Williams told him about his visit to the jewelry store and Yuan went into great detail about his trip to see Master Chu. He told him about dropping the stick off with Doc Stanford to see if it had been used as the murder weapon.

  “You have to consider the skill and arrogance someone would need to use it to kill three different people,” Yuan pointed out. “It’s why I started asking around town with the local Chinese about who might have this level of expertise. Most of the time when someone wants to kill, they use a gun or knife. They might even employ poison. But a rattan staff? Hardly ever. You expect to find a table leg used in a domestic incident, but not as the preferred weapon of choice.”

  “I’m a little surprised the jewelry store didn’t take my warning too seriously,” Williams added. “You think he’d be concerned about his livelihood.”

  “He looks out the window and sees all the police and security guards,” Yuan pointed out. “He gets complacent and assumes he doesn’t have anything to worry about. I’ve seen it before.”

  Yuan’s phone went off and he picked it up. “Detective Yuan here,” he announced.

  “This is Charles Gordon down at the crime scene lab,” the voice said on the other end of the line. “Doc Stanford wanted us to push the sample to the front of the line and we have a result on the DNA on the cane versus the samples from the three murder victims.”

  “What is it?”

  “We have a positive match with Aber’s DNA. Nothing on the other two.”

  Yuan thanked him and broke the connection.

  “It was used in to kill The Spinner,” he told Williams. “But not the other two.”

  “It’s enough to get a warrant,” Williams told him. He picked up his phone and made a call to a local judge’s office.

  The door opened at the warehouse this time to a police officer holding a search warrant. The old man who greeted them the first time looked at the warrant with incomprehension. Yuan stepped out from behind the police officer and handed the man an identical copy in Mandarin Chinese. The old man looked at it, this time with a bit more understanding and recognized Yuan from the time he was by with his cousins.

  “What does this mean?” he asked Yuan in Mandarin.

  “It means you have to let us inside to search the premises,” Williams said in Mandarin as he stepped from behind two more officers who were next to them. Yuan had noted the outside security camera when he visited the warehouse the first time and had made certain they approached the building from an angle where they wouldn’t be noticed until they were at the door. There was no reason to alert them too early. Yuan didn’t want the frightened Master Chu and his family to destroy any potential evidence before they were across the threshold.

  The officers with Yuan and Williams pushed their way through the door and entered the warehouse. It was not busy this early in the morning and only a few members of Master Chu’s family were inside the main room, checking over the stock on the shelves. Boxes were piled up everywhere containing merchandise shipped from Mainland China to supply all kinds of stores that sold Chinese manufactured products. An electric tow motor stood to one side of the wall, plugged into a generator.

  “What is the meaning of this intrusion?” Master Chu barked out in Chinese as he confronted the officers as they swarmed into the warehouse. When most of them looked at him in confusion, he repeated himself in English.

  “We have a warrant to search the premises,” Yuan told him in Chinese. He turned back to the officers with him. “I just told Master Chu we have our search warrant. I will translate to the best of my ability for everyone.”

  “If you need any help, just let me know,” Williams said in Chinese.

  “You!” Master Chu said to Yuan, “I let you in here and this is what I receive in the way of respect? Have you no shame?”

  “I have plenty of shame, Master Chu,” Yuan told him. “I also have plenty of desire to see justice is brought to the people who murdered three innocent men. I think you can help us show honor to your family by assisting with the solution of a crime.”

  “Do your best,” Master Chu told him,” trying to conceal his rage. “You will find no evidence we are withholding anything from the law.”

  “Thank you, Master Chu. Now if you will please be so kind as to not interfere with our tasks.”

  The officers and detectives fanned out through the warehouse looking for anything which might have bearing on the crime. They shined lights through shelving units and moved boxes out of the way. Of particular interest to Yuan was the training hall portion of the warehouse where a stage rested in the middle surrounded by signs with Chinese characters promoting loyalty and harmony. He took out each weapon and looked for signs of bloodstains. Every rattan fighting stick and staff was examined by the officers who searched for any indication they may have been used in the murder of the two other victims.

  “Not finding anything,” Williams said to Yuan an hour into the search. “I’m afraid if they had anything here it may be gone.”

  Yuan turned and looked at the stage in the middle of the floor. The bottom portion was high enough to hide something beneath it. He walked over to it and tapped it a few times with is hand. It gave a hollow sound beneath. The perfect place to conceal something.

  Yuan stood back and tapped the side of the stage several times. Cheap plywood he speculated and then put his foot back further than before. One quick strike from his shoe knocked a space open as the board flew to the inside. Yuan looked at the space, which was open beneath the stage.

  “Can we get a light over here?” Yuan shouted, and one of the officers stepped
over to him with one. He shined the light under the stage and looked up to Yuan.

  “There’s somebody inside here!” the officer exclaimed.

  “Alive?” Williams asked him.

  “He’s moving around,” the officer responded, “so I would say yes.”

  Yuan walked back over to the stage next to the hole he’d punched into it. “I order you in the name of your family to show them honor by coming out from under this stage right now!” He yelled it in Chinese and English to be on the safe side.

  There was a shuffling sound and four officers trained their guns on the stage as a form crawled out from under it, through the hole, and stood up by the side of it. The figure stretched out and showed himself to the crowd. When he saw the guns, he put his hands up in the air.

  The figure was a ten-year-old child.

  “Put the guns down,” Williams ordered the officers. Just to make sure, he repeated it in Mandarin Chinese.

  The kid looked at everyone and lowered his hands. Surrounded by men with guns and his family, he did what any normal youth would have done in the situation. He broke out in tears and began sobbing.

  “Identify yourself,” Yuan ordered him in both languages.

  “Tommy Lee Chu,” the kid announced. It was deadly quiet in the warehouse. The officers formed one unit, with the family and employees of Master Chu in another.

  “Who ordered you to hide under that stage?” Yuan asked him. He glared at the boy with firm determination.

  “My father,” he announced to the detective.

  “Who is your father?” Yuan demanded from him.

  The boy pointed at Master Chu.

  “Master Chu,” Yuan began, “Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you can get into for putting your son’s life in danger? I should call Children’s Protective Services right now and have them take charge of this young boy.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Master Chu snarled at him.

  “Oh! Wouldn’t I? Just try me, Master Chu.”

  The air in the warehouse became frozen. It was punctuated by the sound of a police radio scanner asking for advice on when to send a backup unit. The officer who held the radio turned down the volume and returned to watching the standoff between Master Chu and the detective.

  “Do I need to take both of you down to the station?” Yuan asked Master Chu. “Do you really want it to finish this way? Master Chu, I do not want to embarrass you in front of your family. You can tell me what I want to know and we can conclude our business right now.”

  “I will tell you what you want to know,” Master Chu finally spoke. “Please, do not cause my son grief. We can go into my office and talk. Just do not hurt my son.”

  “I need one of you to sit down with the boy,” Yuan said to the officers. A policewoman emerged from them and took the boy by the hand. She sat down with Tommy and began talking quietly with him.

  Yuan and Master Chu were in his office for over an hour. The tension in the warehouse eased up when they went into the room. By now, a news crew was outside the warehouse, but one of the officers managed to keep them away from the door. He explained they were interfering with a crime scene investigation. This didn’t go over too well with the news crew, but it kept them satisfied for the moment.

  Williams stood outside the door trying to catch some idea of what they were discussing inside the office. In the meantime, he looked at the stock in the warehouse. It contained all kinds of parts relating to the home appliance industry. Someone understood people were willing to pay lower costs for replacement parts for their washer and dryers.

  The door opened from the office. Yuan and Master Chu emerged from it.

  “Master Chu has an announcement to make,” Yuan said.

  The next day Yuan and Williams were in their office at the station house finishing the report. The breakfast meeting at the diner was still on their minds along with the conclusion of the case from the day before. They understood it would only be a matter of time before they were needed again by the city of Philadelphia to tackle another unsolvable crime. Both men sipped another cup of coffee and worked in silence.

  “What made you think of the stage?” Williams asked Yuan. “I looked at it myself several times, but it went right over my head, or under it, as the case happened to be.”

  “Someone once told me,” Yuan said to him. “If you want to hide something, hide it in plain sight. Put it where people will walk around it every day and never dream that is where it’s hidden. My mother used to put the cash from the restaurant into a jar of cookies on the counter near the entrance every day. No one saw her do it. Thieves broke in several times while we were closed and tried to find her cash reserve, but they never found it. I didn’t know where she kept the money until she had to go into the hospital one day and told me where to find the cash to pay the cooks in the back.”

  “It was the boy he trained to kill which shocks me,” Williams said to him. “That kid was unleashed with a rattan cane and told exactly what to do each time. What made him do it without hesitation?”

  “The way he was raised,” Yuan explained. “His father was one of the most respected martial arts instructors in his home town. Everyone in his family and the employees were made to show Master Chu honor on a daily basis. You do something like that all your life and your father becomes a god to you.”

  “Well, I respected my old man, but, Jesus, he never had me kill someone in cold blood.”

  “Again, it was the way that boy was raised. There was never any thought of questioning of a decision his father might make. Did you not see the way everyone showed respect in that warehouse to Master Chu? They all owed him favors. He paid for their way over here. His company was their livelihood. The man was the Godfather for real.”

  “And the way he went after those comic book guys. Insane. I’ll never understand what motivates people.”

  “He told me it was the night he saw them parading around the neighborhood in their colorful costumes, trying out some basic martial arts they knew from training at another school which advertised on TV. To Master Chu, what he knew was not to be shown to the uninitiated. He didn’t even believe people outside his immediate family needed this knowledge. To see a couple of clowns parading around as if they were real Shaolin monks, that was too much for his honor. Giving the staff to his son and having him do the deed was his way of ensuring the boy would be a deadly fighter all his life. The boy felt he had to prove to his father that he was a killer to earn his respect. The Spinner’s death was incidental. If he hadn’t begun poking around in the murders himself, he might be alive today. I’m certain we were next on Master Chu’s list.”

  “I’ve asked for the staff back after they’re finished with the trial,” Yuan told him an hour later.

  “Really?” Williams said to him. “Why would you want it?”

  “I told Master Chu I would place it where it would always be respected and honored. I intend to keep my word.”

  Two months later, a trial was held in the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the City of Philadelphia. After lengthy cross-examination and display of evidence, Master Chu was convicted of first-degree murder of three men in the “Comic Book Murders” as the local media termed the sensational crime. Master Chu’s son was allowed to return to China under a government-supervised program.

  Master Chu confessed to the crimes in public at the end of the trial. He had not pleaded one way or another and watched to make sure the state convicted him, and him alone, of the murders before confessing to his guilt. He gave a press conference from prison where he detailed how he carried out the killings and accomplished them with his skill at using a stave of rattan. As per their agreement, Yuan made certain the boy did not suffer in the court proceedings.

  “You know,” Williams said to Yuan a month after the trial concluded. We have let the real murderer go free. I know what we did was right, the boy was not to be held liable for his actions under the
control of his father, but the courts might see it differently if they really knew what happened.”

  “I consider justice has been done,” Yuan said to his partner. They were riding in Yuan’s SUV on the way to investigate another drug-related crime. “The boy was not responsible for those deaths, it was his father. Sometime, you have to play judge and jury. I know it’s not the right thing to do according to the American legal system we follow, but I will let heaven be the final judge.”

  Williams sighed and picked up his cell phone when he heard it buzz. Was doing the correct thing the same as doing the legal thing? There were some days when he couldn’t decide. He’d watched too many plea bargains and criminals get off on technicalities to care anymore. The number calling him was the captain’s. He took the call.

  “So what is it now, captain?” He asked the phone.

  “I need to pull you both off the shooting uptown. Something else happened last night in a hotel on The Landing. It’s at the Commodore Frank Hotel. Looks bad, so get over there.”

  “Will do, Captain,” he told him and put down the phone.

  Book 4: Dogs

  Chapter 1

  It was a wintery morning in the Philadelphia City, Old Town district, and the shoppers had finished their holiday buying for the year, at least for the most part. The banks were closing and plenty of people lined the marble floor of the Last National Bank of Philadelphia. It was not really called the Last National Bank; this was a local term for the place. It derived from the many different banks, which had occupied the building where it now stood. The building, a large and secure structure from the nineteenth century was no longer the financial institute it was even thirty years ago, but plenty of people still used it to hold their money.