Fall Guy - Hardcover

CHAPTER
ONE

DETECTIVE BARRY GILBERT STUDIED THE body of Edgar Cheng Lau: his arched back, his bent left knee, and extended right leg. Edgar’s big toe pointed with ballet-like grace toward the kitchen door. An elegant corpse, poetic in the positioning of its limbs. His bloodstained shirt, pulled up to his ribs, revealed a flat well-muscled stomach and a ragged gunshot wound. He was about thirty-five. His pale hand clutched a ball of blood-soaked Kleenex; he looked as if he’d been trying to stanch the flow of blood from his wound. His Chinese eyes, partially open, gazed at the French doors, contemplated them in the disturbing dullness of death, as if he found meaning in them—as if beyond their rain-speckled panes he saw things only a dead man could see.
The middle of December, Christmas ten days away, and nothing but rain; no snow, just rain, beating on the old slate shingles of the third-floor dormers, on the tar-and-pebble roof above, on the street outside. Gilbert looked around. Chinese ink drawings hung on the walls. The futon furniture—a sofa and chair—had been slashed, the stuffing pulled out, as if someone had been looking for something inside them. A camera sat on a table. 7-Up cans, crushed to flat little disks, lay piled in a broken bamboo cradle. Books filled the shelves, some Chinese, some English, many on photography, some on Chinese history, a few on Vietnamese history. Dozens of them had been yanked from the shelves and tossed to the floor. Rainwater had been tramped across the hardwood floor in ill-defined footprints. A step ladder stood in the middle of the living room. A torn piece of bloodstained newspaper lay beside it.
Gilbert walked over, had a closer look: a triangular piece of newspaper, ripped from one of the Chinese dailies, stained with small dry smears, slightly crumpled, as if someone had been trying to wipe blood with it, sitting here far from the main pool under Edgar’s body. What could it mean?
Gilbert’s partner, Detective Joe Lombardo, sixteen years his junior, smart, young, handsome, came out of the bedroom with a photograph album. He also carried a nine-round clip of ammunition. Lombardo flipped through the photograph album as he approached Gilbert, his dark eyes scanning the photographs with Mediterranean intensity.
“What’s with the clip?” asked Gilbert.
Lombardo held up the magazine. “Forty-five caliber,” he said. “I found it between the mattress and the box spring,” he said.
“No gun?” asked Gilbert.
“No gun,” said Lombardo. “But take a look at these photos here.”
He showed the photograph album to Gilbert, flipped to a page roughly in the middle. The photographs were old, black-and-white, shot on 35-mm film. The deck of a ship. Crowded with men, women, and children, all East Asians, their bodies wasted and thin, their eyes sunken, their expressions hopeless, as if they’d been adrift a long time. The ship, badly pocked with rust, looked barely seaworthy. A few older men stood around the deck with rifles. Some looked out to sea, others stared sullenly at the camera. One of them had a bandoleer of machine-gun ammunition crisscrossed over his chest. Two black pigs tethered to the railing ate what looked like a large snake.
“Boat people?” said Gilbert.
“That’s what I thought,” said Lombardo.
“He’s got Vietnam history books over there,” said Gilbert. “A lot of stuff about the war.”
The two detectives looked at Edgar Lau. Then back at the photographs. Then at the camera on the table. A Pentax 35-mm. A professional camera. Lombardo turned the page. More photographs, these ones in color, taken with a different camera. Standard Kodak film. The photographs showed the pockmarked ship from the deck of a much larger ship, way down in the well of the blue sea, not so crowded anymore, not as many children. The people on the boat looked up, peering from under the brims of wide straw hats. Another photograph showed sea-worn East Asians climbing aboard the much larger ship, struggling up a rope ladder, all of them skinny; brown stick people with shaggy black hair. Then photographs of white people on the bigger ship, some in uniform, two or three in regular clothes, one man wearing a shirt with a large collar, a garment identifiably from 1970s.
“That’s a Dutch flag up there,” said Lombardo, pointing to the ship’s mast.
Gilbert glanced at their victim. Had the man been on that boat, he wondered, maybe as a child a long time ago? Why else would he have this photograph album? He gave the album back to Joe.
“We voucher the clip,” he said.
“I agree,” said Lombardo.
Gilbert turned to the victim. He took a few distracted steps toward Edgar Lau.
“Barry?” said Lombardo.
Gilbert didn’t answer. He knelt beside Edgar. A handsome face. Skin the color of ripe wheat, a strong jaw, wide cheekbones, black hair, but with a streak of turquoise dye in it, like his nineteen-year-old daughter Jennifer had. The detail stuck, Edgar connecting to Jennifer, Jennifer connecting to Edgar, each saying something with a bit of blue dye. A rebel? Perhaps. A small earring pierced his left ear. He had a striking nose, a nose not often seen on a Chinese, strong, with a Roman bridge. He wore Levi’s and a black leather belt studded with hobnails.
“Poor bugger,” said Gilbert.
Lombardo turned, pointed to the French doors. “The killer came in the back,” he postulated.
Was that why Edgar stared at the French doors with a look of such perplexity on his face? Gilbert gazed at the French doors, twelve panes of glass in each, the white paint flaking from the frames, showing older green paint underneath, the corners of each frame darkened with mildew. Beyond the windows the rain came down like a deluge—black, inky, rattling against the metal fire escape like inmates rattling their bars before a prison riot.
“No sign of forced entry,” said Gilbert.
“And the victim has an ammunition clip,” said Lombardo. “Which means there’s got to be a gun. Only we just haven’t found it yet.” The clip an undeniable signpost, an intimation of a problematic investigation. “A man who owns a gun wouldn’t leave his back door unlocked.”
Here was the mystery. Not only the clip, but the French doors, unlocked, the water tracked onto the floor, no splintered latches or broken locks, just Edgar Lau opening the door for his killer, maybe talking to his killer, but ultimately succumbing to his killer. What did that say about the relationship between the victim and his attacker? Gilbert got up. Edgar knew his murderer. His killer had entered without protest or resistance. Perhaps words had been exchanged. Then the murder weapon had been fired. And the apartment had been searched.
“I’d like to talk to the first officer again,” said Gilbert. “What’d he say his name was?”
Lombardo took out a damp notebook and consulted the second page. “Kennedy,” said Lombardo. He looked up. “Donald Kennedy. From the 52 Division. Your old division.”
Gilbert nodded, thinking of 52 Division down on Dundas, a big white building, his home during his years in patrol, a squat building with as much Chinese writing on the big glass doors as English writing.
“Was there anything else in the bedroom?” he asked.
“Lots,” said Lombardo. Gilbert caught a whiff of Lombardo’s musky cologne. “Luggage packed on the floor and several quotes for plane tickets to San Francisco.”
The two detectives walked to the bedroom, the soles of their wet shoes squeaking against the floor. As they crossed the hall, Gilbert spotted scratch marks on the hardwood floor. He knelt and had a look at them: four scratch marks configured into the corner points of a rough rectangle. He remembered the ladder. He looked up and saw an access panel recessed into the ceiling leading to the attic, a dirty handprint visible on the white paint, and a sticker of the Rolling Stones’s famous mouth-and-tongue logo in the corner.
“We’ll check the attic later,” he said.
They continued into the bedroom.
Two Samsonite suitcases stood packed on the floor beside the bed. A small writing table, badly scarred, with some green paint splattered in the left top corner, stood next to the bed. Ink and brushes rested on the desk. Several samples of skilled Chinese calligraphy lay on top of the blotter, the scimitar-like strokes constructed delicately one against the other like a fragile house of cards. Gilbert moved these samples aside and found quotes for airline tickets—the price for two fares, Toronto to San Francisco.
“I wonder who he was taking?” asked Gilbert.
Lombardo looked around. “He’s a bachelor,” he said. “It takes one to know one.”
Gilbert scanned the wall. “Look at this photograph,” he said. Edgar loved his photography, that was for sure.
A framed photograph hung on the wall: a man and a boy sitting on a small yellow motorcycle with a wide eucalyptus-lined boulevard in the background; street and shop signs not in Chinese but in Vietnamese, U.S. soldiers in battle fatigues and helmets standing on street corners. The man and the boy smiled, their teeth broad and white in their brown faces. Both were wiry, strong, resembled each other. The boy carried a bamboo cage full of pigeons.
“Is that him?” asked Lombardo, pointing to the boy. “Is that our victim?”
From out in the hall Gilbert heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. He looked at the street scene closely. A boy in that faraway time in that faraway place, smiling happily on the back of this yellow Honda motorcycle. Was this smiling boy Edgar Lau? The ceaseless December rain on the tar-and-pebble roof sang a soft song overhead. The b...