White Ghost

by Steven Gore

  Winston inspected Gage’s face through his wire rim glasses. “Are you trying to fill in a blank, too?”

  Gage shook his head. “Our focus is on who killed your brother and why, not on blank filling, and we have some ideas we’re working on.”

  “Which are?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not ready to share them.”

  Winston reddened, opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. Finally he nodded and said, “I did some Internet research about you after Sylvia left this afternoon, so I know the kind of work you do. And I called a friend’s father who’s a lawyer with a big firm in Beverly Hills. He said they hired your firm last year on a government contracting fraud case in Iraq and that you recovered something like forty million dollars. He was surprised you were interested in just a homicide.”

  “There’s no such thing as just a homicide. A life is a life.”

  Winston shrugged. “You know what I mean. Because my brother did some things he shouldn’t have almost twenty years ago, the police seem to be blaming him for his own death.”

  Gage imagined Ah Ming had been thinking the same thing, that Ah Tien brought it on himself.

  “We’d like your help, but we don’t want you telling anyone what we’re doing. If the wrong people start thinking we’ve figured out this homicide might be connected to something they want hidden, they’ll come after us.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not even your mother?”

  “Okay.”

  “Not even your friend whose father is a lawyer in Beverly Hills?”

  Winston smiled and nodded. “What do you need?”

  “To start with, your brother may have brought a briefcase back with him from New York.”

  “There’s one in his room, but I don’t know how long it’s been there. The detective looked inside, but he just left it. I guess he didn’t find anything important. You can have it if you want.”

  “Does your brother have an office at the Great Asia Import and Export in LA?”

  “Just a cubicle in a room with other sales reps. I’m going back to UCLA tomorrow and I can see whether his supervisor will let me take what’s there that belongs . . . I mean . . . belonged to him.”

  Gage tilted his head toward Sylvia. “She’ll fly down with you and bring it all back, and maybe you can get her into the place where he lived down there.”

  “I can get the spare key he left with us, but the house is pretty bare. Monklike. A lot like him, or at least how he became in the last five or ten years.”

  “Became how?”

  Winston hunched forward, paused for a moment, then spoke.

  “I guess you could say that in some ways he was more in my parents’ and grandparents’ generation than mine. He went to a trade fair in Shanghai a few months ago, then down to Guangzhou to meet a woman my folks had picked out for him to marry, like it was 1930.”

  “Is that where your parents are from?”

  “And where he went to elementary school. My parents know a lot of people in Southern China who have daughters they want to send to the States and they wanted a daughter-in-law that spoke Cantonese, like them.”

  Gage smiled. “Has your mother been looking for a wife for you?”

  “That’s a whole different problem that Chinese culture hasn’t prepared her for. I’ve read all the old texts, but there don’t seem to be arranged marriages for gay people.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Gage circled back. “You know whether he traveled anywhere else in China besides Shanghai?”

  “I don’t think so, unless taking the five-minute ferry ride across the river to Pudong counts as going somewhere else. I know he was there because he wrote me a postcard from the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower talking about how much of Shanghai he could see. He never said much about his work. I think the only reason he told me about Shanghai was because I needled him about picking his own wife.”

  “What about Taiwan?”

  “I know he was there a few years ago, when I was still in high school. He showed me some Taiwanese money when he got back.”

  “You said the police are still taking a hard view of him because of things he did when he was young.”

  Winston pointed his thumb toward San Francisco across the bay, now overlaid by the evening’s fog.

  “You remember when the Wo Hop To triad came from Hong Kong and tried to take over Chinatown?”

  Gage nodded. That was almost twenty years earlier.

  “My brother was in the Stockton Street Boys. Until Wo Hop To showed up, all they did was stand around and look tough. If the police hadn’t taken them seriously, not that many people would have.”

  In fact, that wasn’t true. The Stockton Street Boys were the muscle protecting gambling dens and houses of prostitution, extorting protection money out of restaurants, and committing takeover robberies of Chinese homes down the peninsula.

  But Gage didn’t challenge him.

  “Everything changed when the Wo Hop To guys came from Hong Kong and recruited the Stockton Street Boys to join them. They couldn’t just look like hard guys, they had to do stuff or get pushed off the streets. There was a shoot-out where a couple of rival tong heavyweights got killed. The police always believed my brother was involved.”

  “Did he get arrested when Wo Hop To finally got rounded up?”

  Winston nodded. “But he wouldn’t snitch and there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him, so they had to let him go. I think the arrest may have scared him out of the life. I never saw him with any of his old Stockton Street friends after that. He went to work at East Wind and then moved down to LA. My folks were really proud of him, and grateful, too. A few years ago he bought the house we live in.”

  “Even with the best intentions,” Gage said, “some guys have a hard time leaving that life behind. The adrenaline rushes. The money. The women. The power.”

  “He wanted all that stuff when was young, but after the shootings, he became just a face in the crowd. A lot of Stockton Street Boys hooked up with United Bamboo, 14K, and Big Circle, the triads that filled the vacuum Wo Hop To left, but Hai-tien turned into a working guy.”

  “He make any money at it?”

  “A lot.” Winston looked away for a moment and his brows furrowed, then he shook it off and said, “But it didn’t seem like he was under a lot of pressure. Wasn’t always scratching for clients. He had his regulars, and it looked to me like he was satisfied with those.”

  “You ever meet anyone he worked with?”

  “I went by his office a couple of times and he introduced me to a few people, but I don’t remember their names.”

  Gage leaned forward, folding his arms on the table.

  “Now, here’s the tough one. Why do you think your brother was killed?”

  Winston shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You think you’ll be ready for the answer if we find it?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” Winston took in a breath and blew it out. “I think I can live with it, but I’m not sure my mother can. Losing her husband and son back-to-back has really torn her apart.”

  “DON’T YOU THINK Winston has a theory about what happened to his brother?” Sylvia asked as they walked toward her car in the underground garage.

  “The kid is an accounting major. He knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and Ah Tien wasn’t working very hard for what he got. My guess is that Winston fears what we know. By refusing to cooperate with the police against his bosses in the Wo Hop To, he proved he was a stand-up guy. Somebody noticed and he got himself promoted.”

  “And that’s why Ah Ming walked Ah Tien into the Eight Dragons Café.”

  “Exactly.”

  Sylvia unlocked her car doors and they got in.

  “You want to meet tomorrow when I get back from LA?” Sylvia asked, turning the ignition.

  “I’ll be busy. Let’s do it the day after.”

  She looked over. “Are you g
oing out of town?”

  Gage avoided her gaze. “No. I’ll be local. You can reach me by phone.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No. Just something I need to take care of.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Gage and Faith arrived at the Stanford Hospital reception area at 7 A.M., an hour before his scheduled surgery. They found that the OR was as busy as Dr. Norman had predicted, and Gage was wait-listed, a standby passenger for a trip to the unknown.

  He surveyed the room. The surgical patients wore their private hopes and terrors on their faces as they waited to be distributed among the operating rooms. Based on age, sex, fragments of quiet conversations, and the tears, grunts, and limps that accompanied them as they entered, he guessed what had brought some of them to this place: a mastectomy along the wall to his left, a hip replacement across from her, a heart bypass in the corner—

  And a biopsy biding his time at the near end.

  It wasn’t until the early afternoon that Gage finally got his turn.

  IT SEEMED TO GAGE that it was only moments after the anesthetic took effect that he awoke in the recovery room. He lay there unfocused, trying to recall what had brought him into this confusion of light and steel. He felt an itch under his chin, then reached up and worked his fingers over the gauze wrapped around his neck and down a plastic tube protruding from the incision.

  Now I remember, Gage thought to himself. Today’s the day they’re going to decide the course of the rest of my life.

  Gage tried to look around to see if there was anyone to give him the answer he’d come for, but his head felt sewn to the pillow. He struggled against it and tried to sit up.

  A hand gripped his shoulder from behind and locked him in place.

  “Whoa there, partner,” a male voice said, “you’re not quite ready for a walk in the park. Hang on a little longer. We’re gonna be rolling you outta here in a few minutes.”

  Gage looked up at the nurse, a skinny man who looked to be about thirty-five with a farm-boy face. “I was thinking I would step out for some coffee, Tex.”

  Even to himself, his words sounded slurred, but the nurse’s smile told Gage he’d understood.

  “There are just two problems with that. One, despite this being California, the coffee in this place is lousy, and, two, you’d fall flat on your face.”

  After the nurse released his grip, Gage felt himself drifting off again, and then arriving in a Costa Rican rain forest he and Faith had once visited. Lying in the hammock, he could feel the humidity, hear the rustle of leaves on the jungle floor, and smell the loamy soil. Faith was dressed in a floppy brown hat and was walking among the ferns beneath the tree-formed canopy listening to the chirps and songs of the birds, and peering down among the heliconias and up into vermilion poró trees.

  He opened his eyes to see Faith standing above him.

  “Graham? Graham?”

  Gage blinked against the bright fluorescent lights. “What time is it?”

  “It’s about six.”

  “When did we . . . How long have I been . . .”

  “They brought you in here a few minutes ago.”

  Gage blinked again and looked around the pale green hospital room. Dr. Norman was standing next to Faith.

  “The operation went fine,” Norman said. “I was able to get into the tight areas and take out two lymph nodes more easily than I’d anticipated. I don’t think there was any nerve damage.”

  “I think that was my second question.”

  Gage caught Faith’s eye. She never could lie to him. He knew the answer and looked back at the doctor to receive it.

  “I’m sorry. It’s lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s. I had pathology examine a sample during the operation. I think the nature of your work and where you’ve traveled interfered with our coming to the correct diagnosis sooner. It pointed us in the wrong directions like a broken compass, toward places where you might’ve encountered pathogens, instead of internally. It looks like you’ve had a slow-growing form for quite a while without knowing it, and then it transformed and turned aggressive. We’ll have a more specific diagnosis by tomorrow.”

  Gage looked over at Faith, “I guess the tail wasn’t wagging the dog.”

  Norman looked back and forth between them. “The what?”

  “It’s nothing, it’s just the way he predicts the future.”

  “Which is?” Gage asked.

  “We can’t know that until we do some staging to see how far its spread.”

  FAITH RETURNED FROM WALKING DR. NORMAN to the hallway in time to see Graham drift off again.

  She’d also guessed that the tail wasn’t wagging the dog. She’d thought she was prepared for the results, but she wasn’t, and wasn’t sure how anyone could ever be. She stared at his sleeping figure, then sat down by his side, laid her head on his chest, and wept.

  She’d already searched the National Cancer Institute Web site and applied the research skills she’d mastered over a lifetime to the diagnosis.

  There wasn’t a cure.

  CHAPTER 20

  After the nurse checked him out the next morning, Gage and Faith walked the long sidewalk from the hospital to the Stanford Cancer Center. They entered to find a series of glass-walled rooms—and he saw his future in the faces of those who’d arrived ahead of him: thin, pale, hairless victims of radiation and chemotherapy seated alongside their wives or husbands or children, some waiting for their doctors to take the measure of their lives, others waiting in their sickness to learn whether they were healthy enough to continue chemotherapy, still others deadened by failed hopes.

  Gage gave his name to the receptionist, then he and Faith found two chairs along the wall.

  “Hey, it’s the coffee drinker,” a man seated to the right of Gage said in a familiar drawl.

  Gage looked over. “Tex? I mean, what is your name?”

  “Tex’ll do.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “This is what got me into nursing. I got leukemia about ten years ago. Came out here from Dallas for treatment. I loved the place, loved the people. Felt like it was time for a career change. So here I is.” Tex smiled. “This is what I call sweaty palms Wednesday. Every couple of months I walk over here and they check me out.”

  “How many times you been through chemo?”

  “Twice and a bone marrow transplant.”

  “And how do things look now?”

  Tex shrugged. “I’ll find out in a few minutes.”

  Gage watched Tex’s eyes go vacant for a moment. He suspected that Tex knew more than he was saying.

  Tex changed the subject. “I heard from the surgeon that the grim reaper is looking you over, too. You here to get signed up for treatment?”

  Gage shook his head. “This is just an oops-made-a-mistake-so-sorry-you-don’t-have-cancer-we’ll-all-do-lunch-and-laugh-about-this-later appointment.”

  “That’s what we call a big mistake meeting, and they don’t have those here.”

  “How about a small mix-up meeting instead?”

  “They had that yesterday.”

  “When’s the next one?”

  “There isn’t a next one, they’re always yesterday.” Tex tilted his head toward the bandage covering Gage’s incision. “Which kind you got?”

  “Non-Hodgkin’s. It was slow growing for a long time, then it went a little nuts.”

  “Ouch. That’s the tough one. Even if they clear out the wild stuff, you’re still gonna be left with the creeping cancer you started with—and it’s gonna get ya.”

  “You know if they take trade-ins?”

  Tex smiled again. “Only on small mix-up days.”

  A nurse carrying a file folder called out Gage’s name.

  “See you around, Tex.”

  “Good luck, partner. I’ll be pulling for you.”

  The nurse escorted Gage and Faith to a counter where a clerk sat in front of a computer monitor.

  “You’ve been assigned to Dr. Stern. She�
�d like to see you right away. I should be able to squeeze you in this morning.”

  “Anytime is fine.”

  “I think maybe by 11:30?”

  “That sounds pretty close to anytime. We’ll be here.”

  “Stop by on your way out and I’ll give you a radiology requisition form for an MRI of your head. You’ll need to get it done in the next few days.”

  Gage felt Faith’s hand tighten in his. They both guessed that the point of the MRI was to determine whether the cancer had reached into his brain. They walked back to the main hospital building, bought coffee at the café, then went outside to sit on benches in the flower garden near the entrance.

  “You didn’t seem surprised by the diagnosis,” Faith said, “and it wasn’t just because of the anesthesia hangover.”

  Gage shrugged. “We’d pretty much run out of other possibilities. I figured that’s what it had to be, so I decided I’d better just get used to it.”

  They drank in silence watching patients and those with them coming and going, knowing that they, too, would be among them for the rest of Gage’s life. After fifteen minutes, Gage stood up, tossed their empty coffee cups into the recycling bin, and looked back at Faith.

  “You ready?”

  Faith leaned forward and rested her arms on her thighs. She then took in a long breath, let it out, and rose to her feet.

  “Ready.”

  Gage took her hand and they walked back inside.

  CHAPTER 21

  Sylvia and Alex Z were waiting for Gage in the conference room when he arrived at the office the next day. Even though he wore a turtleneck sweater under his sports jacket to conceal the tape-covered incision, he could tell when he entered that Ah Tien wasn’t the first item on their agenda.

  “What’s going on, boss?” Alex Z asked.

  “I do the same thing for a living that you do,” Sylvia said “and I know something is up.”

  “I was going to talk to you about it in a few days. But I guess now is okay.”

  “Thanks,” Alex Z said, “we’ve really been worried about you.”

  Gage closed the door behind him and sat down.