FORTY-ONE
“Both gangs tried to recruit me, even though I was so young,” Kwan said. “The Green Dragons considered me family, and the Ghosts wanted me even more, so they could indoctrinate me and make me forget my past.”
“You went with the Dragons, I assume,” I said.
“Actually not. I was more afraid of the Ghost Shadows, because they had killed my father. I was foolish enough to think I could get inside their fold and, when I got older, pay them back for what they had done.”
“Bad story. Tired plot. I think you can stream that movie right now on Netflix,” Mike said.
“Who were you living with?” I asked.
“Neighbors, mostly,” Kwan said. “That’s when my mother reappeared, just for a day. Perhaps the happiest day of my life, but short-lived happiness it was.”
“Why?” I said. “Was she hurt too?”
“No. But she had come back to send me away—far away, to China—when she got word of my father’s murder,” he said. “To the good relatives, as she liked to call them.”
“The same day?”
“She had a fake passport made for me on Forty-Second Street—you could do that for twenty dollars back before 9/11, if you remember that. She took me to JFK in a taxi and loaded me on a flight to Hong Kong,” Kwan said. “My grandfather had his driver pick me up at the airport on that end and take me to his house—more accurate to call it a mansion. It was my introduction to Kwan Enterprises.”
“That must have been culture shock,” Mike said.
“You cannot imagine it, Detective. The first thing my grandfather did was ground me for three months. He had me cleaned up, bought me fine clothes, taught me table manners, and had me tutored in languages—Chinese dialects, English, French, and Japanese.”
“You had no problem adjusting?”
“I spent five years adjusting, Mr. Chapman, to the finest luxuries and experiences that life offered,” Kwan said. “I left my youth behind. I took my grandfather’s name—George—and I can’t say that I never looked back, but I didn’t do it very often.”
Maybe Kwan had cleaned up his life. Maybe Mike was seeing ghosts where there were none. The gangs had lived out their short, violent lives in two decades. Neither one of them existed today.
“Was your father ever locked up?” Mike asked.
“I’m sure he was. There were times he’d disappear for days, and neighbors had to take me in,” Kwan said, repeating his father’s name and date of birth. “You’ll find out more about him in police files than I know; that’s for sure.”
“How about you?” Mike asked.
“I was just a kid.”
“Kids get locked up too.”
“I guess I was just lucky, Detective. I got out of town in time.”
The room looked like a museum-quality collection of antiques and stuffed heads. The mahogany paneling and shelves spoke to Kwan’s wealth. The leopard-skin rugs, the taxidermied grizzly bear in one corner, and the horned creatures mounted on the walls spoke to his deadly obsession with the hunt.
“What’s your mother’s name?” Mike asked.
“My late mother, Mr. Chapman,” Kwan said. “Her name was Alvarez. Maria Alvarez. Now, what else do you want from this visit?”
“Where did you learn how to shoot?” Mike said.
“Long guns, Detective? In China. It’s become a destination for game hunting,” Kwan said, shifting positions in his chair. “My adoptive father—my grandfather, but I called him my father—insisted I learn how to shoot.”
“Why’s that?” Mike said. “I would have thought you’d seen enough of guns when you were a kid.”
“Quite a different thing, pistols and rifles. My father took me to hunt in Mongolia,” Kwan said. “By the time he sent me away to boarding school, rifle practice was a mandatory part of the curriculum.”
“When you’re in the States,” Mike said, “when you’re home, where do you hunt?”
“Back to the Paul Battaglia connection, are you?”
“Where do you hunt?”
“Anywhere I please, Mr. Chapman. I’ve been all over the country.”
“That preserve where Justice Scalia died?” Mike asked.
“I’m not in the Order of Saint Hubertus, if that’s where you’re going,” Kwan said. “No Asians need apply, as they used to say of the Irish. I’ve been other places in Texas—there are so many of them—that don’t require membership.”
“Have you ever hunted with Battaglia?”
“No. No, I haven’t. I actually didn’t believe the hunting stories were real,” Kwan said. “He liked prosecuting those rhino-horn traffickers so much, I wasn’t sure what he was up to with Hubertus.”
“Talk to us about Chidra Persaud,” Mike said.
Kwan smiled and let go of his collar. “You may think you’re in a business that requires fortitude and strength, Ms. Cooper, but that Persaud is one tough broad.”
“You know her?” I asked.
“Not personally, no.”
“How, then?”
“One of our business partners tried to interest her in our services a year or so ago, but she wouldn’t have us,” Kwan said. “We threw money at her—lots of it—but we couldn’t get her to engage with us.”
“Did anyone from Kwan Enterprises meet with Persaud to discuss the deal?” I asked. I wanted to see how far along this proposition had gotten. So far, they both told the same story.
“Persaud came to Hong Kong. She came to look at the books. That’s how I remember it.”
“But you weren’t around?” Maybe my due diligence theory was right. Maybe Chidra had found some evidence of criminal wrongdoing when she examined Kwan Enterprises’ books—something to snitch to Battaglia about if she became the subject of an investigation.
“No, I was here at home. I would have liked to try to break her ice-maiden exterior.”
“You know she has a hunting preserve in Montana?” Mike said.
“Yes. I’ve been told it’s a first-rate place. Rocky Mountain bighorns,” Kwan said, “which are the American equivalent of our Mongolian blue sheep.”
My disgust about shooting sheep probably registered on my face.
“Have you been to Persaud’s preserve?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Mike stood up, walking around his chair and picking up a leather-bound book from the edge of Kwan’s desk, checking out its spine and the gilded lettering on its cover.
“What can you tell me about Pedro Echevarria?” Mike said, standing over Kwan, picking a vantage point from which to look down at him.
George Kwan picked up his monogrammed sterling case and removed another cigarette, lighting it with a slight shake of the hand.
“Good man,” he said. “Excellent shot.”
“I understand he won the Kwan scholarship to the big hunt at Persaud’s preserve in ten days,” Mike said.
“Then he’s lucky, too, wouldn’t you say?”
“Does he work for you, this Pedro Echevarria?”
“He does,” Kwan said. “He’s in charge of keeping all my hunting equipment in top shape, around the world. He often travels with me.”
“Then you knew he was going to Montana on November first?” Mike went on.
“I did.”
“You must have known, too, that he was going to be Paul Battaglia’s partner on the hunt.”
“Also that. It’s actually one of the things Paul and I were talking about—now that you’ve reminded me—the day I missed you. The DA was hoping to get some shooting instruction from Echevarria.”
“I didn’t know he was a teacher,” Mike said.
“You seem to know most else, Detective.”
“But you weren’t planning on being there, in Montana?” I asked.
“Not for that shoot,
no. I expect to be in China next week.”
Mike put down the book and splayed his hands on the desk, facing George Kwan.
“Ms. Cooper and I were working on something with Paul Battaglia when he was killed,” Mike said. “Something so secretive that very few people knew about it—knew he was onto it.”
“Surely, I wouldn’t have been one of those in the know,” Kwan said, crushing the cigarette in the ashtray and retying the knot on his smoking jacket.
“You want to get out of those pj’s, Mr. Kwan? I always think it sounds more serious when a guy isn’t talking to me in last night’s rumpled bedclothes.”
“Go on, Detective.”
“Paul Battaglia came here to talk to you about Diana,” Mike said.
Kwan’s hand was on his cigarette case. He let it go, involuntary, as his fist clenched.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “You’re wrong.”
“The DA took one look at you on his television set, sitting at the Metropolitan Museum gala—and he saw Alex Cooper pass by, behind you, and speak to you—”
“That’s a lie!” Kwan said, turning to me. “I never saw you there. We never talked.”
He happened to be right, but that didn’t stop Mike from bluffing. The photograph had worried me, too, when Prescott first showed it.
“You’ll see the photo,” Mike said. “Maybe you didn’t recognize Ms. Cooper, but you must have heard what she said. What Battaglia sent her to tell you.”
The look of panic on George Kwan’s face was real. He stood up, pressing a buzzer on his desk.
“I didn’t hear anything that night,” Kwan said. “What was Battaglia’s message to me? What are you trying to do here?”
The security guard—Rudy—had rushed into the room.
“This meeting’s about to be over, Rudy,” Kwan said. “I think my guests are ready to go now.”
“We know that Diana is the name of a hunt club,” I said. “And we know that you aren’t a member.”
George Kwan didn’t say a word.
“And we know Paul Battaglia talked to you about Diana,” I said. “He told me so himself.”
Kwan spoke the next three words slowly and emphatically, separating them from each other. “He did not.”
“You’d be wrong about that,” I said. “I can play you a tape of our conversation.”
Kwan froze momentarily. “A tape? That bastard was taping me?”
The tape I was talking about was Battaglia’s last phone call to me, when he feared I had actually spoken with George Kwan at the Met. I was fine to let Kwan think otherwise.
“What is it you trade in, Mr. Kwan? I mean, besides the things printed in your advertisements?” Mike asked. “And how did you think Diana, or Chidra Persaud, could help your—shall we say ‘business plan’?”
“Search all you like. We run a legitimate company,” he said. “We always have.”
“Were you smuggling in exotic animals from Asia, so she could stock her game preserve?”
“I want to hear the tapes,” he said. “I don’t even know that woman. Let me have the tapes.”
“In due time,” Mike said, turning his back to Kwan. “When I’m good and ready.”
“Paul Battaglia was killed because someone didn’t want him meddling in this world of big-game hunters and trophy animals,” I said. “Someone he trusted, Mr. Kwan, betrayed him.”
I knew that was the truth. I realized the DA must have found himself in a world of high stakes and endangered species, lured in by the chance to mix with an elite group of international sportsmen.
“You know exactly where I was Monday night, Ms. Cooper.”
Paul Battaglia had liked the spotlight too much—more than had been good for him. Almost forty years of solving crimes and basking in the high-profile results of his young teams of lawyers had jaded him. He had risked going in on projects alone at first—like he did with the Reverend Shipley and with Operation Crash—sniffing out the illegal act with his great instinct for wrongdoing, stepping on the toes of another prosecutor whose rightful jurisdiction the matter would have been, and then turning the mess he’d stirred up over to his own faithful crew of public servants.
“I saw where you were during the show, Mr. Kwan,” I said. “I have no idea what you did after you left the museum.”
The security guard motioned for Mike to move out of the room.
“I don’t think Paul Battaglia knew you well enough to trust you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said. “But I happen to disagree with Ms. Cooper. I don’t think you have to be in so deep to betray someone, do you?”
“Battaglia didn’t know me well,” Kwan said, caught in the middle of that thought, “You’re right about that. But I never gave him any reason not to trust me.”
“We’ve got an eye on you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said, swiveling around to talk to the man. “And we’ve got a high-powered scope attached to it. Keep that in mind as you go about your day.”
He saw an object on Kwan’s desk and picked it up. It was a magnifying glass—a beautiful object—resting on top of the Sunday Times. It had brass trim and its long, carved handle was made of ivory.
“Worth killing for?” Mike asked.
“It’s an antique, Detective,” Kwan said, quite defensively.
“I didn’t mean your ivory trinkets, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said, putting down the glass. “I meant the district attorney.”
“Only his killer can tell you that, Detective.”
“Well, if you run into him—or her—be sure and mention that we’re getting really close to bagging our prey,” Mike said, walking toward the door of the dark room.
George Kwan put his hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket.
Mike wasn’t quite done. “And if I’m thinking right that there’s a price on Alex Cooper’s head, too,” he said, glancing in my direction before I interrupted him.
“Don’t go there, Mike,” I said. I took a deep breath. I could almost feel the flames from Friday night’s Molotov cocktail licking at my neck.
“There won’t be anyplace on this planet I wouldn’t go,” Mike said, “to put a bullet in the brain of the mastermind behind that idea.”
FORTY-TWO
“Give me a list,” Mercer said.
The three of us were sitting at the back table at P J Bernstein Deli on Third Avenue, less than ten blocks from Kwan’s house. Mike had stopped at a street vendor’s cart to buy me a baseball cap, thinking that with the hat, my collar turned up, and shades on, some of the neighborhood regulars wouldn’t make me and butt in.
“We can do this all together,” I said.
It was eleven A.M. I had ordered an egg-white omelet while the guys both went for scrambled eggs and bacon.
“No, we can’t, Alex. I can go to One PP,” Mercer said, laughing at me, “but you’re off-limits there.”
“We’ll eat,” Mike said, “and I’ll run you back up to Three Sisters.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, peppering my omelet.
“It’s safe,” Mercer said. “What do you need?”
“I know the tech guys have been going over hours and hours of street surveillance,” Mike said. “If Kwan’s behind this, I’d start checking on whether Battaglia was being followed by someone from Kwan’s team from the time he left the town house.”
“That was Friday afternoon,” I said. “The murder was Monday night.”
“So let’s assume the shooters weren’t sitting near Battaglia’s apartment—in plain sight of his own bodyguard—on Monday only,” Mike said. “They might have figured he was tucked in for the night by that hour, and the fact that he rushed out so late could have suggested there was some urgency to his appointment.”
“I get it,” I said. “Whoever’s behind this killing must have had a team on Battaglia—probably for days.”
&nb
sp; “Exactly. TARU needs to find street surveillance tapes from near the DA’s home and play them till a week before the murder,” Mike said to Mercer. “It’ll take all the men they’ve got to free up and watch hours of this stuff. Possible tails from when he came and went from the office, coordinated with his meetings and breakfast stops—they can find them in his diary. They’ll have to scan the streets from dozens of yards away.”
“That might give us license plates—even faces, ’cause they wouldn’t have been wearing masks until the moment of the kill.”
“All on the theory that at some point, the man in charge of ordering the hit was ready to have a sharpshooter take Battaglia out—if and when that became necessary,” Mercer said.
“And it seemed only to become necessary on Monday night,” Mike said. “But that doesn’t mean the guys tailing him—possibly gunmen—weren’t in place before then. Days before then.”
“TARU it is,” Mercer said. He was chewing on a strip of crisp bacon. “Big job, but at least they can get started today.”
“This guy, Pedro Echevarria,” Mike said. “He’s good with a gun. But I can’t imagine anyone, especially a whiz like Kwan, would use someone as visible as Pedro to do this killing—someone who goes out in the world with Kwan, does business with him, and was even scheduled to shoot with Battaglia in Montana.”
“You’re probably right about that,” Mercer said.
“Where do you learn to shoot around New York?” I asked.
“The NYPD range is at Rodman’s Neck,” Mercer said. “In the Bronx.”
“Yeah, but that’s the only one I know of,” I said.
Cops have to go twice a year to be retrained, but civilians aren’t welcome. I had been several times to observe police procedures and never saw an outsider.
Mike was on his iPad, Googling shooting ranges. “There’s something called West Side Rifle and Pistol Range on Twentieth Street,” he said. “Coyne Park in Yonkers. Ranges in Woodhaven and in Bay Ridge. They seem to be all over the place.”
“We got some calls to make,” Mercer said, jotting down the names. “Looking for—exactly what?”
Deadfall Page 29
