“But he’d never have made me,” I said. “I was wearing that dress I borrowed from Joan, with a dark wig and makeup that I never use.”
“Stevie Wonder would have known it was you, Coop,” Mike said. “You looked ridiculous, but you looked like you, even in that awful getup.”
“We got television outtakes, too, Alex,” Vickee said. “Film that was shot but never aired.”
“How did you ever get outtakes?” I asked. “The networks never give them up. I’ve subpoenaed them in cases and always meet with a brick wall.”
“This is an assassination, Coop,” Mike said. “This is the murder of an elected official. Nobody’s going to stonewall the US attorney about video feed from a fashion show, for Christ’s sakes.”
I hadn’t touched the glass of wine yet, but I was ready for a large gulp.
“We were watching the clips this afternoon, Alex,” Vickee said to me. “You’re in several of them, actually, as you walked around the room, during the prelude to the show on the runway, as the guests were being seated.”
“I know what you’re going to tell me,” I said. “I’d been drinking before the show. I had a cocktail with Joan’s mother after I got dressed at her apartment, and then some of the champagne that they were passing out at the party in Dendur.”
I had probably been a bit reckless, because I thought no one there would know who I was. I was going cold turkey with my Scotch intake. If there was something to embarrass me on the tapes, I was changing my behavior faster than a lightning strike.
“Do you remember talking to anyone?”
“To anyone?” I said. I was getting as defensive with my dear friend Vickee as I’d been with Prescott. “I’m sure I was perfectly sociable. I greeted lots of people.”
“You heard Mike mention Anna Wintour,” Vickee said.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember seeing her there?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “She had the best seat in the house. Fifty-yard line, front row.”
“Did you talk to her?” Vickee asked.
“That would be crazy,” I said, snapping at Vickee and pulling my hand away from Mike. “I don’t know Anna Wintour.”
“You were circling the room,” Vickee said. “Remember that?”
“Sure. Sure I do.”
“When you reached the point where Wintour was sitting, you stopped,” Vickee said. “You stopped cold in your tracks.”
“I did?”
Vickee looked at Mike. She seemed unhappy to be pressing me, but he nodded at her, and so she went on.
“You leaned in to say something to someone, didn’t you?”
“You must know,” I said. “You were watching outtakes.”
“Well, it’s just that most of the cameras were focused on Anna Wintour before the show started,” Vickee said, offering me a warm smile. “You happened to be in a lot of those shots, and this one got airtime. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Go for it, Vickee,” I said. All I recalled was swallowed in a haze.
“There was a man sitting next to Wintour. You leaned over and it looks like your lips were moving, Alex. You spoke to one of them,” Vickee said. “Did you know the man?”
I bit my lip and stared at Stephane’s face—over Vickee’s back—as he prepared a Caesar salad from scratch for diners at the next table.
I must have noticed who had the seat next to Anna Wintour on Monday night. It was prime real estate at the show. But I couldn’t call it up for the life of me.
“I must have said ‘excuse me’ as I passed by,” I said. “Maybe I stepped on her foot.”
Vickee glanced at Mike again, then at me. “You were behind them, Alex—nowhere near their feet. You leaned over to say something to one of them.”
She was trying to feed me the information, but I wasn’t picking up any of the signals.
“I wish I could help you,” I said. “All of you. I mean, it would help me, too, if I knew what made Battaglia leave home and come after me.”
Vickee reached into her tote again. She pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph, then reached across the table, moved my plate, and placed it in front of me.
“That’s a still of the camera shot,” she said. “See yourself?”
“I do.”
“See the man next to Anna Wintour?” Vickee asked. “Do you know who he is?”
I grabbed the edge of the photo. “I know it looks like I’m saying something to one of them, but I couldn’t have been. I had no reason to.”
“What’s his name, Alex?” she asked. “Who is he?”
“That’s Kwan,” I said to her. “That’s the man we’ve been telling you about just now. It looks like I’m talking to George Kwan.”
NINETEEN
“What the fuck?” Mike said. “Why were you talking to Kwan? You didn’t tell me anything about that. And he just played dumb on me, too. What the fuck’s been going on?”
“You’re all just pounding on me,” I said, pushing against Mike’s shoulder to urge him to stand up. I was between Mike and Mercer on the circular banquette and I wanted them to release me. “Let me get up, will you, please?”
“Stay calm and let’s just figure this out,” Mercer said. “Sit tight.”
“You tell me you want the old me back,” I said. “That I’ve been wimpy and whiny and soaking myself in alcohol since I was kidnapped.”
“But it will take—” Vickee tried to placate me but I didn’t give her the chance.
“The bad news is—I’m back. Okay with that? I am back,” I said. “I am so ripped about the way I’m being treated by Prescott and Detective Stern and now—now by my best friends. And you, Detective Chapman, can take that glass of Montepulciano and suck on it yourself. I am angry beyond your imagining and about to explode. But I am very much back, so be careful what you wish for.”
My three friends were silent for a few moments.
“What’s the good news?” Mike asked.
“Let me out of this booth and I’ll tell you.”
“Spit it out, ’cause I’m not moving.”
My head was spinning.
Mike looked away from me to Vickee. “So why did Scully give you the green light to talk to Coop about this? It seems like it would have been the perfect fodder for Prescott to go at her with tomorrow morning. Did he give the task force the same tapes?”
“Yes, Prescott’s got it all too. But frankly, since this snippet already aired on the news, as opposed to being buried in outtakes, the commissioner figured Alex or you might have seen it,” Vickee said. “Or at least been alerted to it by her team in the unit.”
The DA’s press office taped local news stories all day and evening. It had been a long tradition, yielding the occasional bit of luck when an eyewitness to a crime talked to a reporter instead of a cop, or a defense attorney stood on the courthouse steps, announcing the names of his witnesses for the next day at trial. Any prosecutor could walk into the pressroom and play back clips that might be of interest.
“Nobody called me,” I said. “This is the first time I’m seeing the photo.”
“Better here than in front of James Prescott,” Mercer said. “You can think it through now.”
“There’s nothing to think through. I don’t need excuses.”
“Look, babe,” Mike said. “Mercer and I know you met George Kwan in the Savage offices, at WolfWear. And I was with you when your boss walked out his front door the next afternoon. What I don’t understand is why you would have said anything to him at the gala.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I swear to you I didn’t.”
“The footage from which that still was made was taken before all the ruckus began,” she said. “Are you sure you remember?”
Mike slid the glass of Montepulciano out of my reach.
; “I’d never have done that. Talk to him, I mean.”
“You’ve got all night to figure it out, Coop,” Mike said. “’Cause your man Skeeter will be ready to rip you a new body part if you hold out on him.”
I was already in the hole with Prescott. Now I had a logical way in to address my omission of Kwan’s name earlier in the week. The photograph reminded me about my sighting of Battaglia at his home. But it also muddied the waters in my own mind.
“Slow down,” Vickee said. “What made the three of you detour to Kwan’s house tonight?”
“This afternoon, Deirdre Wright—my contact in the Development Office at the Bronx Zoo—said Kwan was a big donor.”
“So she knows him?” Vickee said.
“No, she’s never met him. She called Kwan a man of mystery,” I said. “She thinks of him as an apparition—a ghost. That creeped me out.”
“It’s funny how that got me thinking on the ride back to Manhattan,” Mike said, “although we’re all too young to know about this, but the idea of an Asian ghost—who might be a bad guy—made me think of one of my old man’s biggest cases.”
“First of all, you’re on your way to political incorrectness,” I said.
“Nothing new under the sun,” Mercer said.
“Why Asian ghosts would be different from any other phantoms isn’t clear,” I said, chewing on a piece of baguette Stephane had brought with our drinks. “And two, the last time you channeled one of your dad’s cases, it almost turned out to be the end of me. It’s a noble attempt at distracting me, I’ll give you that.”
Mike’s father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated detectives in the NYPD. His unique combination of intelligence, skill, and great instincts had solved more homicides than an entire squad of officers could do in a year. Something in his DNA had been passed along to his son.
“I’m thinking ghost. Chinese ghost,” Mike said. “Chinatown. Ghost Shadows. Ring a bell?”
“Not even a whisper of a chime,” I said. “Educate me.”
“The Ghost Shadows was a gang that terrorized Chinatown for a decade, up through the early 1990s.”
“Our Chinatown?” I asked.
The DA’s office fronted on Centre Street, but the back door—once known as the notorious Five Points, made famous by its killer gangs of New York—had been Chinatown for more than a century, with the largest concentration of Asians living together in the Western Hemisphere.
“What was their business?” Mercer asked.
“It was a criminal empire,” Mike said. “As diverse as crime could be, the Ghost Shadows got into it. Extortion, gambling, and racketeering. There was a time not so long ago when they owned the streets in that ’hood.”
“How?”
“Because gambling has always been a problem in the Chinese community. It’s a big part of their culture, as is not trusting banks with their money,” Mike said. “Fact. Not a slur.”
“I remember the first time I ever handled a robbery on Pell Street,” Mercer said. “The guy’s mattress had been ripped to shreds because that’s where a lot of the older immigrants kept their money.”
“Exactly,” Mike said. “And all the young gangstas had guns, which they stashed in those metal mailboxes in the lobbies of the tenement buildings they were robbing. It was almost impossible to catch them carrying heat.”
“There was enough money in gambling?” Vickee asked.
“Betting parlors on Mott Street and Baxter and Division?” Mike said. “They were all illegal. The locals played for tens of thousands of dollars—dominoes, thirteen-card poker, even mah-jongg. The Ghost Shadows offered them protection from the police—at the cost of about twenty thousand a week back then, so it was real money—and then roughed them up when they didn’t make payments.”
“Murdered them,” I said, “if your father was involved.”
“Yeah. Roughing up in the first degree,” Mike said. “There was a five-year period in the eighties when there was a trail of thirty rival gang members and a handful of bystanders killed. They had a hand in everything that happened in and around Canal Street.”
Mercer snapped his fingers and pointed at Mike. “You started thinking of Kwan because basically what he was trying to do to the late Wolf Savage was extortion. Big-time extortion.”
“You know, it’s one of those weird word-association things,” Mike said. “Why does Kwan’s name keep coming up in this case?”
I stopped chewing.
“He and his brothers have turned a respectable generations-old family business into a shady global operation. What once was export-import generations ago is now this concept of the Kwans finding the cheapest labor, much of it in Asia and India, to steal production away from many of the high-end fashion houses. They go low-scale and increase the risks for half the people who work for them, in places that have no regulations on the working conditions of the labor force. The Kwans were pushing hard to drive the Savages out of contention—so, yes, extortion was part of it,” Mike went on. “Then, why is George Kwan cozy enough with Battaglia that the DA goes to the guy’s town house—which is guarded like a fortress—in the middle of the afternoon?”
“And why does Battaglia lose his marbles when he thinks he sees me talking to Kwan at the museum?” I said.
“Then we get the tip about Battaglia and the Order of Saint Hubertus,” Mike continued, making connections, “that led to Alex remembering the DA being honored at the Animals Without Borders dinner.”
“Which Kwan Enterprises also supported,” Mercer said. “So Deirdre mentions the man’s name, and calls him a ghost—”
“And all I can think of is the bad old days in Chinatown,wondering whether any of the gang leaders my father locked up—like Wing Yeung Kwan—were the ancestor ghost shadows of our man George.”
“Any sign that he’s into the gambling business?” Mercer asked.
“The Chinese gambling industry was shut down when the big casinos were opened in Connecticut by Native Americans,” Mike said. “But the minute Deirdre Wright said the word ‘ghost’ in describing George Kwan, I started thinking of the Chinese and criminal enterprise. The Ghost Shadows actually went international.”
“From Canal Street?” Mercer said.
“The last murder rap my father nailed against them was for fleecing investors for millions of dollars in a phony international bullion-trading company,” Mike said. “The head of the enterprise set up a bogus firm in Hong Kong to do business in Chinatown as the Evergreen Bullion Company—to buy and sell gold on the open market. Instead, it was all phony trades, fake confirmation slips, and a huge commission for trading.”
“I bet all the investors were immigrants—from his own country,” Mercer said.
“Yup. That’s why most of them wouldn’t go to the police, because so many were here illegally,” Mike said. “The Ghost Shadows were extremely opportunistic. When they saw a way to make money, they jumped on it. My father handled the murders that happened when the Green Dragons tried to get a cut of the business.”
He paused and looked at Mercer.
“Sort of reminds me of what I know about Kwan Enterprises,” Mike went on, “sensing a weakness in the fashion industry and filling the gap with a dangerously cheap overseas operation.”
Mike stopped talking when the waiters came to the table with our dinners.
“That’s a bit of a reach,” I said.
“We’ve got nothing at the moment. I’ll give you that. That’s when I start stretching for ideas,” Mike said. “Why didn’t your boss tell you he had a relationship with the man when Kwan surfaced in the Wolf Savage investigation?”
“Obviously, I can’t answer that. I wasn’t supposed to be working on the case,” I said. “I don’t know if word ever got to him, before the case was solved—just an hour before Battaglia was killed—that we met Kwan the week before.”
“How did Kwan figure in that one?” Vickee asked. “Tell me more about his business.”
“Kwan Enterprises is an investment holding company that’s headquartered in Hong Kong, just like the phony bullion business was.” I sat quietly, letting Mike tell the backstory. “For several generations, it was a trading company, concentrating on the export of porcelain and jade and silk, until the UN imposed a trade embargo on China.”
“Got that,” Vickee said.
“Then, according to my research about the family last week,” Mike added, “almost everyone in the Asian export business stepped over the line into smuggling a century ago.”
“Smuggling their goods?”
“Sure. These operations had been around for decades before that in the nineteenth century, and suddenly the US government banned a lot of the products being imported. Many of the Chinese resorted to smuggling, as a way for their businesses to survive.”
“That’s what Kwan Enterprises did?” Vickee asked.
“While a lot of Asian companies buckled and went under, the Kwans were more nimble,” Mike said. “They got involved in some illegal export work, but then shifted their interest to the apparel industry, outsourcing the production of goods to the cheapest labor markets around the world.”
“They’re a trading group,” Vickee said. “That’s not criminal.”
“It’s ugly, though,” Mike said. “It’s a lot like slave labor.”
Vickee responded to those last two words. “That’s different.”
“Think Bangladesh or some remote part of China,” he said. “Unsafe facilities. Places where buildings collapse on workers, or they get trapped by fires, or child labor is used. That’s Kwan Enterprises.”
“I’ve got the image,” she said. “So how do you know the DA had something to do with him?”
“We didn’t,” Mike said. “We chanced on Kwan when we crashed a business meeting at the offices of Wolf Savage’s company. So Coop and I decided to follow him to his town house on East Seventy-Eighth Street, in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Did he meet with you then?” Vickee asked. “Did you talk to him?”
Deadfall Page 14
