“See the man next to Anna Wintour?” Vickee asked. “Do you know who he is?”
I grabbed the edge of the photo. “I know it looks like I’m saying something to one of them, but I couldn’t have been. I had no reason to.”
“What’s his name, Alex?” she asked. “Who is he?”
“That’s Kwan,” I said to her. “That’s the man we’ve been telling you about just now. It looks like I’m talking to George Kwan.”
NINETEEN
“What the fuck?” Mike said. “Why were you talking to Kwan? You didn’t tell me anything about that. And he just played dumb on me, too. What the fuck’s been going on?”
“You’re all just pounding on me,” I said, pushing against Mike’s shoulder to urge him to stand up. I was between Mike and Mercer on the circular banquette and I wanted them to release me. “Let me get up, will you, please?”
“Stay calm and let’s just figure this out,” Mercer said. “Sit tight.”
“You tell me you want the old me back,” I said. “That I’ve been wimpy and whiny and soaking myself in alcohol since I was kidnapped.”
“But it will take—” Vickee tried to placate me but I didn’t give her the chance.
“The bad news is—I’m back. Okay with that? I am back,” I said. “I am so ripped about the way I’m being treated by Prescott and Detective Stern and now—now by my best friends. And you, Detective Chapman, can take that glass of Montepulciano and suck on it yourself. I am angry beyond your imagining and about to explode. But I am very much back, so be careful what you wish for.”
My three friends were silent for a few moments.
“What’s the good news?” Mike asked.
“Let me out of this booth and I’ll tell you.”
“Spit it out, ’cause I’m not moving.”
My head was spinning.
Mike looked away from me to Vickee. “So why did Scully give you the green light to talk to Coop about this? It seems like it would have been the perfect fodder for Prescott to go at her with tomorrow morning. Did he give the task force the same tapes?”
“Yes, Prescott’s got it all too. But frankly, since this snippet already aired on the news, as opposed to being buried in outtakes, the commissioner figured Alex or you might have seen it,” Vickee said. “Or at least been alerted to it by her team in the unit.”
The DA’s press office taped local news stories all day and evening. It had been a long tradition, yielding the occasional bit of luck when an eyewitness to a crime talked to a reporter instead of a cop, or a defense attorney stood on the courthouse steps, announcing the names of his witnesses for the next day at trial. Any prosecutor could walk into the pressroom and play back clips that might be of interest.
“Nobody called me,” I said. “This is the first time I’m seeing the photo.”
“Better here than in front of James Prescott,” Mercer said. “You can think it through now.”
“There’s nothing to think through. I don’t need excuses.”
“Look, babe,” Mike said. “Mercer and I know you met George Kwan in the Savage offices, at WolfWear. And I was with you when your boss walked out his front door the next afternoon. What I don’t understand is why you would have said anything to him at the gala.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I swear to you I didn’t.”
“The footage from which that still was made was taken before all the ruckus began,” she said. “Are you sure you remember?”
Mike slid the glass of Montepulciano out of my reach.
“I’d never have done that. Talk to him, I mean.”
“You’ve got all night to figure it out, Coop,” Mike said. “’Cause your man Skeeter will be ready to rip you a new body part if you hold out on him.”
I was already in the hole with Prescott. Now I had a logical way in to address my omission of Kwan’s name earlier in the week. The photograph reminded me about my sighting of Battaglia at his home. But it also muddied the waters in my own mind.
“Slow down,” Vickee said. “What made the three of you detour to Kwan’s house tonight?”
“This afternoon, Deirdre Wright—my contact in the Development Office at the Bronx Zoo—said Kwan was a big donor.”
“So she knows him?” Vickee said.
“No, she’s never met him. She called Kwan a man of mystery,” I said. “She thinks of him as an apparition—a ghost. That creeped me out.”
“It’s funny how that got me thinking on the ride back to Manhattan,” Mike said, “although we’re all too young to know about this, but the idea of an Asian ghost—who might be a bad guy—made me think of one of my old man’s biggest cases.”
“First of all, you’re on your way to political incorrectness,” I said.
“Nothing new under the sun,” Mercer said.
“Why Asian ghosts would be different from any other phantoms isn’t clear,” I said, chewing on a piece of baguette Stephane had brought with our drinks. “And two, the last time you channeled one of your dad’s cases, it almost turned out to be the end of me. It’s a noble attempt at distracting me, I’ll give you that.”
Mike’s father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated detectives in the NYPD. His unique combination of intelligence, skill, and great instincts had solved more homicides than an entire squad of officers could do in a year. Something in his DNA had been passed along to his son.
“I’m thinking ghost. Chinese ghost,” Mike said. “Chinatown. Ghost Shadows. Ring a bell?”
“Not even a whisper of a chime,” I said. “Educate me.”
“The Ghost Shadows was a gang that terrorized Chinatown for a decade, up through the early 1990s.”
“Our Chinatown?” I asked.
The DA’s office fronted on Centre Street, but the back door—once known as the notorious Five Points, made famous by its killer gangs of New York—had been Chinatown for more than a century, with the largest concentration of Asians living together in the Western Hemisphere.
“What was their business?” Mercer asked.
“It was a criminal empire,” Mike said. “As diverse as crime could be, the Ghost Shadows got into it. Extortion, gambling, and racketeering. There was a time not so long ago when they owned the streets in that ’hood.”
“How?”
“Because gambling has always been a problem in the Chinese community. It’s a big part of their culture, as is not trusting banks with their money,” Mike said. “Fact. Not a slur.”
“I remember the first time I ever handled a robbery on Pell Street,” Mercer said. “The guy’s mattress had been ripped to shreds because that’s where a lot of the older immigrants kept their money.”
“Exactly,” Mike said. “And all the young gangstas had guns, which they stashed in those metal mailboxes in the lobbies of the tenement buildings they were robbing. It was almost impossible to catch them carrying heat.”
“There was enough money in gambling?” Vickee asked.