Jingo: Hey, I’m your man.
Joey: I’d like to call somebody about this weird biz with the narc and the White Lady, but who do you call, the cops? They got their man in here, and I’m gonna end up pushing posies with my nuts hanging beside the mistletoe. Jeez.
Jingo: Okay, let’s dance.
Joey: I’m ready to fold the tent.
Jingo: Right over.
Joey: Good man. See you.
The plot thickens, Tann thought, growing excited. Sounds suspiciously like an alibi in the making. How did the cops get these tapes?
Tape #124 On:17 Feb 78 16:13 Cst. Lesage
Off:18 Feb 78 23:36
Conversation at 258’ Mark
U/M: Hello.
U/F: Okay?
U/M: Yeah, it went just right.
U/F: The whole thing?
U/M: Hey, baby, I told you not to call me from work. You never know when somebody might be listening.
U/F: Pa-ra-noi-a.
U/M: Listen, I know. No phone is safe.
U/F: Sorry, baby.
U/M: Anyway, we sold the property. Down payment of fifty, and the balance when the deal is sealed.
U/F: How much?
U/M: Can’t you wait until you get here?
U/F: I’m just heading out.
U/M: Two-oh-oh.
U/F: What?
U/M: Five-oh plus two-oh-oh.
U/F: Five . . . Far. Fucking. Out. You are my baby. You are my baby.
U/M: Includes your half of the property, sweetheart.
U/F: You just got yourself a great big juicy piece of ass coming your way in about half an hour.
U/M: I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for you, baby.
U/F: See you.
U/M: I’ll be waiting.
Tann wasn’t sure what all that was about. She carefully put the transcripts in a folder, turned off the light, wiggled the blankets into a comfortable mould around her, and began to sleep, her mind drifting out the front door of Archie’s into a more peaceful and secure place. The soft, mocking eyes of Foster Cobb gently haunted her dreams.
In his Vancouver place, the penthouse he shared with Prince Kwan, Au P’ang Wei sat in his robes while his bath was being prepared. He enjoyed these few minutes at the end of the day, enjoyed a communion each evening with Prince Kwan, and gave him a form of love.
Au contemplated the price of innocence. It was high, indeed.
Poor Cudlipp was obviously being led by the nose by a grasping woman, and the result of this greed would be an unfortunate business loss coming at the end of the current fiscal year. But one should not lament these things — the deal had been struck: The rice, as it was said, had been boiled. Au had insisted, however, that final payment be deferred until Cudlipp had begun his evidence. This condition would ensure that Cudlipp would be committed to Au’s defence. (One could never be too sure about policemen, however friendly they may appear on surface. They tended to be unreliable.) And was there not something particularly dangerous about a man who so easily worked both sides? The two-headed snake, the Ch’ao-chou say, hurts or pleases one of two contending parties to suit his purpose.
A sharp pain entered the acupuncturist’s heart as he thought about these things, and he knew there was no point upon his body which a needle could penetrate to sufficient degree to ease it. And suddenly, abruptly, a searing flash of memory . . . of coarse faces . . . black with anger . . . hands tearing . . . blood . . . a deep and primal anguish . . .
In the flat and fertile delta of the Fraser Valley, south of the city, in a farmhouse hidden from the road and fields by rows of tall poplars, on the second floor, in a bedroom, lay Jean-Louis Leclerc, in the arms of his compliant teen-aged lover, who, weakened more by heroin than lust, surrendered to Leclerc’s languid efforts to achieve connection. The heroin dampened Leclerc’s ardor, and the night dragged slowly for his companion.
In the morning, awakened by the alarm, Leclerc sprang from bed and dressed to meet Klegg and Snider for court. He had worked hard and long with Charlie Ming, and today he would observe the fruits of his labors.
Byron Jones lay weakly in bed, happy that soon he would be alone, free of Leclerc. But he was not entirely free.
“Can you fix me before you go?” he asked.
“Oui, ma chérie.” And Leclerc gave the boy a fix from a fat little bag of heroin.
“Please leave me some.”
“No way,” Leclerc said. “I have special use for this.” There was enough heroin to kill a team of horses in Leclerc’s little bag.
“Fuck you,” said Byron Jones.
“And fuck you, too,” said Leclerc sweetly, throwing him a kiss as he walked down the stairs to the front door.
Wednesday, the Fifteenth Day of March,
at Eight O’Clock in the Morning
“Damn it, Charlie, you said Dr. Au was at the H-K Meats.” Cobb was shouting inside the small interview room.
“Don’t remember.”
“Come on, Charlie, you know you are lying. You do remember, and you signed a statement saying he was there when Jimmy was killed.”
“Uh, don’t think so.”
“Who was with you when you went to pick up Jim Fat? Was Laszlo Plizit with you?”
“Uh, yeah, think so.”
“Well, I know he was there. He told me he was there, and you were there, too. There was someone else, too, wasn’t there? There were you, Dr. Au, Plizit, some other guy standing guard outside.” Plizit had been close-mouthed about the identify of the fourth person. “Come on, Charlie, who all went up there to pick Jimmy up?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did Dr. Au say what he was going to do to Jimmy? You understand Chinese, Charlie, what was he saying?”
Charlie Ming looked dumbly up at Cobb. His mouth came open, but no words came out. His hairless scalp glistened with wet beads of effort.
Ming was attempting to summon great resources from within him in an effort to power the ponderous cognitive gears in his mind. That mind was a struggling steam engine, and it seemed forever to be grunting up a hill. Did the prosecutor not understand that he spoke too quickly, and asked too many questions all at once? It was especially hard for Ming to remember whether a particular question called for a truthful answer or one of Leclerc’s.
Leclerc was a patient and persistent teacher who had tutored the slow-thinking Ming in his evidence with dedication — and with a certain feeling of affection. Leclerc liked this blunt ox, a man so inefficient in the arts of deception that he developed headaches while mastering simple untruths. But the script did slowly penetrate the mind of Charlie Ming, and Leclerc had been pleased at his work. Charlie Ming would testify, on oath, that after Jim Fat had been picked up, they had driven to a restaurant on Kingsway, where Au had alighted. According to this version, Ming, Plizit, and Jim Fat then proceeded to Chinatown, where Ming dropped Plizit and Jim Fat off in front of H-K Meats. Ming would testify that later that evening he returned to the building, went inside, saw some blood, and was cleaning it when the police arrived. The evidence was attractive in its simplicity.
For Ming, the task of memorizing all this evidence had been ex-hausting, raising sweat under his arms and red welts on his scarred face.
As an aide-de-camp to the general in Au’s army, Ming had proved himself a faithful retainer, a fearless enforcer.
But fearless as he was in battle, he was as fearful in tasks of the intellect, and cowed easily by those with quicker minds. He was afraid of the prosecutor, Cobb, and wished the man would stop asking questions, would let him rest and save his strength for court. He had been told not to say much to the prosecutor.
“Charlie, listen to me carefully,” Cobb was saying. “In a couple of hours you are going to be brought into the courtroom, and you are going to have to take an oath on the Holy Bib
le, an oath before God that you will tell the truth. I am going to ask you in that court whether Dr. Au was in the meat store with you on December third.”
“Uh, don’t know nothing about that,” Ming said.
“You were supposed to clean the place up and get rid of the body, weren’t you, Charlie?”
“No, uh, don’t know.”
There was a knock then on the door of the interview room. A sheriff who had been posted outside waiting to return Ming to the cells looked in. “Miss Tann is here,” he said, and let her in.
“Sorry, I’m late,” she said, smiling and sitting beside Ming. He had met her during previous interviews and considered her a beautiful but untouchable lady, too perfect to be a prosecutor or a lawyer. Being with her, Charlie felt shy and nervous.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said. “How do you feel today?”
“Not too good. Feel better maybe later, when, uh, go home.”
“I told Charlie he can go home after his evidence is finished,” Cobb said. “If there is no perjury charge, he can go home. Do you know what perjury is, Charlie?”
“I guess, maybe.”
“That’s when you lie in court. The Criminal Code says you can go to jail for fourteen years if you lie in court. Do you understand that?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Now, Charlie, we know you were in that building with Dr. Au and Jimmy Fat, right?”
“No, no, that not, uh, true.”
The lady was smiling and shaking her head.
“Help us, Charlie,” she said. “You should do the right thing.” Her voice was the sound of bells, and he cleared his throat and swallowed, casting his eyes downward. He said nothing.
“Charlie,” said Cobb, “who told you to say these untrue things? Did Dr. Au visit you?”
“No, no, Dr. Au not come.” He was still looking down.
“We know another man came to se you. Leclerc. You know Leclerc, right?”
“Uh, no, no.”
“Jim Fat was a friend, wasn’t he, Charlie?” said Cobb. “You are not being fair to Jim Fat.”
Ming shook his head truculently.
Cobb could not have known of the battle raging within his witness’s trembling heart, where two contending terrors engaged in unyielding combat. The first was a fear of the Surgeon’s knife, but the second fear, more abstract yet as deadly, was a fear that clutched at his bowels — it was a fear of the witness box. Blunt Charlie Ming, lacking too much in wit to be capable of devious speech, was oppressed by the image of himself on the witness stand under the solemn eyes of a hundred people and the stern and forbidding countenance of a powerful judge. There had not been such terror even during the great pitched knife battles of the gang wars of his youth. Charlie Ming had been in court before, for things like assault, drugs, and theft, but his lawyers had considered him to be too dull to make a good witness, and since they could not put him on the stand, they made him plead guilty, and let him go to jail.
The elaborate trappings of the justice system, its ceremony and observances, moved Ming not just in fear, but in awe too. The great assize court was a palace of a higher civilization; the judge’s bench, a throne.
Perhaps Jennifer Tann knew something of his fears. Her mind was more finely tuned to the awareness of others, and at one point during a pause in Cobb’s insistent cajoling, she said:
“Charlie, when you come before the judge, you must speak the truth. He is a great and powerful man.” Then, with Cobb giving her a strange look she spoke a sentence in Cantonese dialect: “In the court he is an emperor, and his net stretches wide, and nothing escapes its meshes.”
Ming looked up at her, and his lips trembled. For Charlie Ming, this was a day of despair.
The judge looked over his glasses at Cobb and nodded for him to begin. Cobb turned to the sheriff.
“Please bring in Mr. Ming.”
As Ming walked through the door, the first person his eyes fell upon was Au P’ang Wei, sitting alone, high in the centre of the room. Their eyes met hard, and Ming felt a burst of electricity run up his spinal cord. He then dropped his eyes, seeking to hide them from the forces churning in this great echoing space. Someone took him by the elbow and led him in a slow march to a wooden stand with railings. He heard voices speaking to him, but fog billowed through his head, and the words were unclear. Finally someone thrust a book into his hand and said something, to which Ming mumbled a response. Then other words: “You may put the Bible down.” He heard that, and obeyed, and dared look up. To his left and above him, in robes of dark black and brilliant red, was the man he knew was his judge. He heard him speak in calm and even tones: “You may be seated if you wish, Mr. Ming.” He understood the words as a command, and sat.
Across from him sat the wise men and women of the jury. From his right eye he could see Dr. Au, and seeing him, he felt a pulling in that direction, a force that could tear his eyes out if he refused to look full at him, to obey his silent commands. He now saw the prosecutor, standing near the jury, who was saying, to Ming’s relief: “Now, look straight over here, at me and the jury. Don’t look around the courtroom. I want you to listen to my questions and answer carefully.” The prosecutor paused, and keeping his gaze steadily on Ming, began:
“You are Charlie Ming.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“And you know the accused, Au P’ang Wei.”
The prosecutor had ordered him to look only at him and the jury, but there was a need to look at Dr. Au, and he looked that way and saw his eyes piercing like daggers. Ming was held by the eyes, frozen.
The prosecutor must have understood, because he said: “Just look over here, Mr. Ming, and concentrate on my questions. You know him?”
“Yeah.”
“Now, I want you to remember back to December third last year. Were you with Dr. Au that evening?”
Ming looked at the prosecutor helplessly, and he looked at the judge, and knew that the judge, the man they called a lord, would know when an answer was false.
“Yeah,” he said.
“And did you know the deceased man, Jimmy Wai Fat Leung?”
“Yeah.”
“And were you with him on that day, too?”
“Yeah.”
“And do you know a man called Laszlo Plizit?”
“Yeah.”
“And was he with you, too?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you go in a car somewhere with Au and Plizit?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you go?”
Ming studied his answer, breathing heavily. “We, uh, go pick up Jim Fat.” He could hear whispers from behind him, where some people were writing notes of his words. It was hard to concentrate.
“Where did you pick him up?”
“At his house.”
“Did the three of you pick him up?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“In whose car?”
“Dr. Au.”
“And where did you go?”
“We go, uh . . .” Ming looked quickly at Au, and the voice of Au in his head was powerful in its exhortations. “We, uh . . .”
The man sitting high above him spoke again, calmly giving an order that sounded in Ming’s ears like a pronouncement from the heavens: “You must answer the question, witness.”
“We go, uh, to National Society office, then, uh, H-K Meats.”
“And what happened at that place?”
Ming could see the other lawyer, Smythe-Baldwin, looking at him from below, his face angry. He was the man who had warned Ming that his words in this court could help convict his benefactor of murder. The man was powerful, Ming knew, but seemed not to have the ultimate power to stop these answers.
Again the judge issued his command: “Please answer the question.”
“What happened there?” t
he prosecutor repeated. “What happened to Jim Fat there?”
“We, uh, make Jim Fat take off, uh, clothes, and tie him, uh, tie him on table.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I . . . take orders from Dr. Au.”
“Did you know what was going to happen to Jim Fat?”
“No, no, no, I never know. I only help.” His tongue was thick, his head aching.
“What did Au do to Jim Fat?”
“He, uh, talk. They talk. I, uh, not understand. I, uh, I, uh, need water.” He clutched the wooden railing for support.
“Miss Tann,” the prosecutor said. She rose and went to a pitcher on the counsel table. “What happened after they talked?”
“I, uh, not know, not know what.” The beautiful lady brought a glass of water, and she smiled at him, and she must have known the great trouble. The lawyer, Smythe-Baldwin, was shaking his head and whispering something to the young man beside him.
“Did you go somewhere?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yeah, I go, uh, look for pail and mop. Go to basement.”
“Why did you go for a pail and mop?”
“Uh, uh . . .” The answer would not come, but he knew it must, or it would be ordered. “Dr. Au tell me. Get mop to clean up. Jimmy, uh, sick.”
“How long were you gone?”
“Uh, long time. Have to, uh, go to basement.”
“And what did you see when you got back?”
Needles Page 15
