“How, then?”
“One of our business partners tried to interest her in our services a year or so ago, but she wouldn’t have us,” Kwan said. “We threw money at her—lots of it—but we couldn’t get her to engage with us.”
“Did anyone from Kwan Enterprises meet with Persaud to discuss the deal?” I asked. I wanted to see how far along this proposition had gotten. So far, they both told the same story.
“Persaud came to Hong Kong. She came to look at the books. That’s how I remember it.”
“But you weren’t around?” Maybe my due diligence theory was right. Maybe Chidra had found some evidence of criminal wrongdoing when she examined Kwan Enterprises’ books—something to snitch to Battaglia about if she became the subject of an investigation.
“No, I was here at home. I would have liked to try to break her ice-maiden exterior.”
“You know she has a hunting preserve in Montana?” Mike said.
“Yes. I’ve been told it’s a first-rate place. Rocky Mountain bighorns,” Kwan said, “which are the American equivalent of our Mongolian blue sheep.”
My disgust about shooting sheep probably registered on my face.
“Have you been to Persaud’s preserve?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Mike stood up, walking around his chair and picking up a leather-bound book from the edge of Kwan’s desk, checking out its spine and the gilded lettering on its cover.
“What can you tell me about Pedro Echevarria?” Mike said, standing over Kwan, picking a vantage point from which to look down at him.
George Kwan picked up his monogrammed sterling case and removed another cigarette, lighting it with a slight shake of the hand.
“Good man,” he said. “Excellent shot.”
“I understand he won the Kwan scholarship to the big hunt at Persaud’s preserve in ten days,” Mike said.
“Then he’s lucky, too, wouldn’t you say?”
“Does he work for you, this Pedro Echevarria?”
“He does,” Kwan said. “He’s in charge of keeping all my hunting equipment in top shape, around the world. He often travels with me.”
“Then you knew he was going to Montana on November first?” Mike went on.
“I did.”
“You must have known, too, that he was going to be Paul Battaglia’s partner on the hunt.”
“Also that. It’s actually one of the things Paul and I were talking about—now that you’ve reminded me—the day I missed you. The DA was hoping to get some shooting instruction from Echevarria.”
“I didn’t know he was a teacher,” Mike said.
“You seem to know most else, Detective.”
“But you weren’t planning on being there, in Montana?” I asked.
“Not for that shoot, no. I expect to be in China next week.”
Mike put down the book and splayed his hands on the desk, facing George Kwan.
“Ms. Cooper and I were working on something with Paul Battaglia when he was killed,” Mike said. “Something so secretive that very few people knew about it—knew he was onto it.”
“Surely, I wouldn’t have been one of those in the know,” Kwan said, crushing the cigarette in the ashtray and retying the knot on his smoking jacket.
“You want to get out of those pj’s, Mr. Kwan? I always think it sounds more serious when a guy isn’t talking to me in last night’s rumpled bedclothes.”
“Go on, Detective.”
“Paul Battaglia came here to talk to you about Diana,” Mike said.
Kwan’s hand was on his cigarette case. He let it go, involuntary, as his fist clenched.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “You’re wrong.”
“The DA took one look at you on his television set, sitting at the Metropolitan Museum gala—and he saw Alex Cooper pass by, behind you, and speak to you—”
“That’s a lie!” Kwan said, turning to me. “I never saw you there. We never talked.”
He happened to be right, but that didn’t stop Mike from bluffing. The photograph had worried me, too, when Prescott first showed it.
“You’ll see the photo,” Mike said. “Maybe you didn’t recognize Ms. Cooper, but you must have heard what she said. What Battaglia sent her to tell you.”
The look of panic on George Kwan’s face was real. He stood up, pressing a buzzer on his desk.
“I didn’t hear anything that night,” Kwan said. “What was Battaglia’s message to me? What are you trying to do here?”
The security guard—Rudy—had rushed into the room.
“This meeting’s about to be over, Rudy,” Kwan said. “I think my guests are ready to go now.”
“We know that Diana is the name of a hunt club,” I said. “And we know that you aren’t a member.”
George Kwan didn’t say a word.
“And we know Paul Battaglia talked to you about Diana,” I said. “He told me so himself.”
Kwan spoke the next three words slowly and emphatically, separating them from each other. “He did not.”
“You’d be wrong about that,” I said. “I can play you a tape of our conversation.”
Kwan froze momentarily. “A tape? That bastard was taping me?”
The tape I was talking about was Battaglia’s last phone call to me, when he feared I had actually spoken with George Kwan at the Met. I was fine to let Kwan think otherwise.
“What is it you trade in, Mr. Kwan? I mean, besides the things printed in your advertisements?” Mike asked. “And how did you think Diana, or Chidra Persaud, could help your—shall we say ‘business plan’?”
“Search all you like. We run a legitimate company,” he said. “We always have.”
“Were you smuggling in exotic animals from Asia, so she could stock her game preserve?”
“I want to hear the tapes,” he said. “I don’t even know that woman. Let me have the tapes.”
“In due time,” Mike said, turning his back to Kwan. “When I’m good and ready.”
“Paul Battaglia was killed because someone didn’t want him meddling in this world of big-game hunters and trophy animals,” I said. “Someone he trusted, Mr. Kwan, betrayed him.”
I knew that was the truth. I realized the DA must have found himself in a world of high stakes and endangered species, lured in by the chance to mix with an elite group of international sportsmen.
“You know exactly where I was Monday night, Ms. Cooper.”
Paul Battaglia had liked the spotlight too much—more than had been good for him. Almost forty years of solving crimes and basking in the high-profile results of his young teams of lawyers had jaded him. He had risked going in on projects alone at first—like he did with the Reverend Shipley and with Operation Crash—sniffing out the illegal act with his great instinct for wrongdoing, stepping on the toes of another prosecutor whose rightful jurisdiction the matter would have been, and then turning the mess he’d stirred up over to his own faithful crew of public servants.
“I saw where you were during the show, Mr. Kwan,” I said. “I have no idea what you did after you left the museum.”
The security guard motioned for Mike to move out of the room.