“Ah,” Art nodded sagely, “a thug with ambition.”
“Chasing the American dream in the Big Apple,” Micky added.
But Roth wasn’t distracted. She kept looking at me. “You walked away from him? Be thankful. This guy likes his work.” Then she eyed the mountain of paperwork on her desk and made an expression of distaste. “Look you guys, I’ll give you what I got. Han’s an animal and I’d hate to see him back on the street. But at first glance, the Sakura killing doesn’t seem like a Ghost kinda job. As for this kid in the train yard…” She shrugged again. It made her uniform blouse move in odd ways: her shield weighed part of the fabric down.
“We’d still like to pick Han up for questioning,” Art said wistfully.
“Maybe make him pay for Connor’s Band-Aids. Got a line on him? Even if it’s old?”
Roth gave them her weirdly sad, yet hard-eyed look. “These guys are mostly teenagers. You two have kids?”
They nodded.
“Teenagers?”
They shook their heads no. Roth grimaced. “I got three. Even I can’t keep track o’ them. Add the whole gang culture to the problem… It’s like a secret society. It’s built to keep people like us far away. And Han, if he’s back, he doesn’t want to be found. Most people on the street know it. You’ll have to shake some trees pretty hard.”
She wasn’t putting much energy into the words: just going through the motions. She sighed and wrote something down on a yellow sticky note. “This is Han’s last known address.”
“Thanks, Roth.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. Any gang is its own special world. Asian gangs are even worse. Chances are you won’t get anywhere near him.”
It was Micky’s turn to shrug. “Guy’s gotta try.”
“You got a liaison with the local precinct we can work with?” Art asked. She did. And she agreed to send copies of her Street Ghost and Han files to them. Then Micky and Art left her, a squat form awash in paper.
When we got back into the car, Art was already on the cell phone. “Cusick?” he was saying to another detective at the precinct house, “you still working with Sakura’s secretaries, looking at mug shots to ID the scary guy at the office that day?” Art nodded at the response.
“Tell him about Han,” Micky whispered.
Art took the little phone away from his ear. “Will you leave me alone?” He rolled his eyes, then moved the phone back. “Cusick?” he continued, “here’s a photo file number.” He read it off. “You have them look at that guy and see if it rings any bells.” Art pushed a button and hung up. The two men looked at each other.
“Interesting,” Micky said.
“Life is full of surprises,” his partner replied.
We hooked up with Roth’s contact, a guy named Whalen out of the I09th Precinct, and cruised the streets of Queens looking for traces of Han. Parts of Flushing had grown into a thriving Japanese and Korean community. The streets were studded with small shops whose signs were in Japanese characters, or the more angular phonetic Korean writing known as Han-gul, told you that you were in a different world—an outsider looking in.
Which was pretty much the way we felt. The cops went through the motions. Checked out Han’s last known address and got blank-faced denials. They asked on the street about the Ghosts. Local merchants all shook their heads no and smiled. Micky admitted he wasn’t sure whether the people they questioned were nervous or secretly amused. Maybe both.
It was the typical response Round Eyes get. I could have told them that and saved us all some wasted time. I had looked into the flat, closed faces of Japanese sensei for years. In the end, they tell you only what they want you to know. It takes a long time to earn their trust. Two detectives from Manhattan without any ties to the local community were not going to be showered with secrets.
So Micky and Art worked the usual levers. All communities, anywhere, have people on the streets who know what’s going on. And often enough these people are vulnerable. They’re junkies or runaways. They need money. A place to hide. Medicine. Sometimes they’re just people who leverage knowledge into a type of secret power. If you can find their weak spots and press hard, these people will tell you things. It’s not particularly nice. Or pretty to see. Micky shrugs it off. “Big bad world out there, Connor,” he tells me.
“Ya take things like ya find ’em,” Art continues. “If you can, you figure a way to turn it to your advantage. And, at the end of the day, you go home and take a shower.”
It’s a reminder of the hard world these two men inhabit. All the joking and patter is their way of hiding it. But under the kidding around, they stoked a focused, fierce anger. Micky and Art never said it out loud, but they worked homicide because every case was like a personal insult they were on fire to redress.
If the streets of Flushing presented them with what seemed to be a wall of silence, Micky and Art knew that, if they looked hard enough, they’d spot cracks. And when they did, they’d hammer at them.
“It’s going to be a long shot anyone up here gives us anything,” Art finally said. Micky grimaced in agreement. You could see that he didn’t want to let it go.
“Maybe we should work another angle,” I suggested.
“Ah, the expert weighs in,” my brother said sarcastically.
I had been watching the street action, but my mind kept flashing back to the pictures of Kim. Horror pulls at you with the piercing directness of its message.
“Let’s think about it,” I told them. “Kim’s what?”
“A student,” my brother said.
“He’s a journalism student,” I corrected. “Working on his master’s thesis.” It was a statement, but I looked the question at Art. He checked through his note pad and nodded in confirmation. “He sees himself as an investigative reporter,” I continued, “and we assume he’s dug something up. He doesn’t quite understand it all, so he starts seeking help.”
My brother nodded slowly as he thought about it. “OK. And he goes to Sakura. So there must be some calligraphy or something involved, right Connor?”
“Sure. And someone… maybe this guy Han…”
“Or the people he works for,” Art added.
“… is pretty upset that Kim’s got the stuff.”
Art was rolling his head from one side to the other as he listened and thought the sequence through.
“So if Kim’s the guy with the information Han wants, why’s he bothering with Sakura?” I asked.
Micky squinted out through the car windshield, seeing his own private world. “Two sequences of events,” he said, starting slowly and then picking up speed as he grew more certain. “Kim was on the run and hard to find. In the meantime, he had contacted Sakura. And then the killer got ahold of Kim.” I shuddered at the memory of the photos of Kim’s murder. I don’t imagine the journalism student held out much once the torture really got going.
“So the killer found out about Sakura and got to him…”
“But he was too late,” Art added, “since the stuff had already been shipped off to Georgia.”
“And the killer followed it,” I said.
“Could be,” Art said.
“What’s the second thing, Mick?” I prompted.
He looked slyly at me, then at Art. “You wanna tell him?”
“He’s your brother.”
“You sure? I mean, it’s OK if you want to…”
“Fellas!” I said.
Micky shrugged. “It’s simple. Sort of. If Han’s our guy, and the secretaries at Sakura’s office can give us a positive ID, then why’s he hanging around the Tibetans? Because he’s looking for more than whatever information Sakura had. He wants that stuff, sure. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Don’t worry, Connor,” Art said sympathetically. “If this stuff were easy, anyone could do it.”
Sakura’s secretaries made a positive ID on Han from the mug shot Roth had showed us and the cops were beating the bushes for him. They were hoping that forensics had gotten some prints from the Sakura crime scene, but my brother wasn’t optimistic. It’s a skepticism reinforced by his occupation. But he called me early Saturday morning to say that the stuff from Georgia had arrived and maybe we could try to find something there.
I sat outside on the stoop to my apartment, waiting for my brother to pick me up. The sky was getting brighter, with a faint blue trying to push through the thin cloud cover. There might be sun today, but this early in the morning, the street was still in shadow and the steps were still cool and damp from the night. The occasional neighbor walked by, dog in tow. A quiet start to the day. It was no surprise when my brother jerked the car to a halt in front of me: I had heard him accelerating when he made the turn onto the street. I think he watched too much
Kojak
in his younger years.
Micky was rumpled looking, like a man who hadn’t gotten much sleep. His mood matched his looks. The car was already rolling as I slammed the car door. “Morning,” I said.
He grunted. We whipped down the block and onto the avenue. Micky double-parked outside a delicatessen and jumped out with saying anything, leaving the motor running and his door ajar. He returned with two big cups of coffee.
“What,” I said, “no donuts?” Micky glared at me. His left eye was bloodshot.
We rocked along the street, making most of the lights. When we hit the expressway, the weekend traffic was light. I sat and sipped my coffee, watching the scenery, reading billboards. On the bridge to Manhattan, I looked down into the East River. The water was dark and dense looking. You imagined that things floated unseen down there, suspended just below the murky surface. The thing with my brother is that you’ve got to know when to poke him and when not to. I figured he’d talk when he was good and ready.
They’d boxed Hoddington’s life up in neat stacks, as if sheer neatness was a response to the chaos of his ending. The copies of documents completely covered the expanse of the conference table in the room Micky brought me to. Art was already there. He had a St. John’s Redmen shirt on, but, unlike my brother, he looked pink and wide awake. He took one look at Micky and started talking to me.
“We weren’t sure what we might need, so we asked for copies of stuff from both his office and the crime scene,” Art told me. He shrugged. “Better to be a little over-thorough…”
I nodded, but thought their Lieutenant would hit the roof when he got the FedEx bill. It wasn’t my problem, though, and I got to work. Pulling documentation together on a violent crime creates a type of surface order. Police reports are neatly clipped into folders. There are lists and catalogues and images of the crime scene. But the more you look, the more apparent the confusion of the event becomes. Sudden death blows in like a violent storm, scattering the pieces of a person to the four winds. What’s left are ashes and the dead fragments of a life.
It wasn’t complete, of course. The Georgia authorities made copies of reports and documents, but original evidence couldn’t leave the jurisdiction. So we had to guess at some things. I read quickly through the crime scene report. I looked at the same crime scene pictures of Hoddington that they had shown me before. And then I began to go through the copies of Hoddington’s papers. Micky didn’t say much, but sat there and watched me quietly. I could tell his mind was elsewhere.
I knew Hoddington had been on sabbatical writing a monograph titled
War Tales of the Great Houses
. I was really interested in what he had received in the last month or so, but I knew how academics worked: something could have been crammed almost anywhere.
There were extensive notes in a spidery hand and Xeroxed copies of manuscripts in Japanese and English. In a bundle marked “correspondence” I found a record of letters from Sakura, seeking Hoddington’s comment on various calligraphic manuscripts. But nothing recent.
Most of the Japanese documents the dead man had worked from were photocopies. Many of the scrolls he had consulted were in university or museum collections, and he had obviously been collecting duplicates for a few years.
The cops hadn’t organized these papers in any way—they were a jumble of source material, handwritten notes, and type-script. Anything that had been in the cabin that could be of some use in solving the crime had been swept up. It took a while to go through it and get a sense of things. I started to sort items by type. I organized the manuscript pages and read through them to see whether there was anything out of the ordinary there. No luck.
I looked at the Xeroxes of the scrolls he had been consulting. They seemed to tie in with the research and there were reference notes linking the different documents with his writing. Again, no luck.
And then, tucked away in a file, a note. It was in Hoddington’s spidery hand, jotted down on the top of a sheet listing references the dead man had intended to cite. It read “E.S.—consult on doc. Problem?” with the last word underlined.
I placed the sheet in front of me and pushed the other papers away. It was tenuous, but here was a link.
There was no date on the note, but it was found in the cabin. I got up and began looking through the files again.
I looked up. “Most of this stuff is copies of copies. Do you know whether there were any original documents in Japanese found at the crime scene?”
Art scanned through the reports and shook his head. “No.
Nada
.”
A dead end. So I tried again. “From the description of the scene,” I told him, “it seems as if there was at least some attempt at a search at the time of the killing.”
Micky stirred, and picked up a file with the crime scene report clipped in it and paged through it. “Yeah, looks like someone went through at least some of the stuff,” he finally said. “They also got a shoe print.” He gestured at the photos and you could see that the killer had tracked through some of the blood on the floor. “We’ll try to match it from the print at Sakura’s place.”
“Time’ll tell,” I said. “Any other signs of a more extensive search than was reported?”
Art’s eyes rolled up as if he were mentally reviewing the pile of stuff in front of us. Micky pawed through the paper.
“Was there a bookcase?” I prompted. “Anything seem moved?”
“No,” my brother said, reading the reports and looking at the photos spread out before us. “The books look like they were in place.”