Blood Passage (34 page)

Sheng said nothing.

“
Can’t think up something fast enough for that one, can you, shithead?” Karen snarled at him. “Mah told you to take him there, didn’t he? After
he
shot him. Right? Am I right?”

“
No,” Sheng said. “Wrong. I shot him.”

“
So why the big-assed drive all the way over to that alley with ShonDale deader than road kill in the trunk?”

“
Throw you off the trail. Make you think gangsters shot him.”

“
Oh, bullshit.” Karen stood up and walked around the table until she was standing next to Sheng. “That’s just bullshit, Sheng, and you know it. That’s the same fucking alley, the
same fucking alley
that Peter Mah’s cousin was found in with the same
fucking
gunshot wound in the thigh with the same
fucking
bag of horse and the same
fucking
needle, so don’t give me that
fucking
bullshit because I know this is Peter Mah’s doing and you’re going to give him to me
right now
or I’m going to personally make sure they strap you to a chair and put you down like the fucking
dog
that you are!”

By this time Karen was leaning down, close to shouting, her nose about six inches from Sheng’s.

Sheng leaned slowly back and stared at her with absolutely no expression.

“
Mah shot Gregg,” Karen said, very quietly. “Right?”

“
Nooo,” Sheng replied, drawing out the word sarcastically.

Karen straightened, looked at Hank, raised her eyebrows and sat down on the corner of the table. “Who stole the damned car, Sheng?”

Silence.

“
What car did you and that moron Foo take to pick up Gregg at his condo?”

Sheng said nothing.

“
Why the hell did you shoot him in the leg first?”

Sheng said nothing.

“
Where’d you get the heroin you planted next to him?”

Sheng said nothing.

“
Are you guys going to shoot Gary next? Huh? Is he next?”

Sheng said nothing.

Henry Lee stirred and folded his hands before him on the table. “My client, unfortunately, has admitted that he shot Mr. Gregg, and he has explained his reasons for doing so. He has explained he didn’t mean to shoot the man and was just beating him up when the gun went off. That’s all there is, I’m afraid.”

That evening Hank stopped by the mansion in Granger Park to see his mother. They sat in her newsroom, a large, high-ceilinged chamber on the ground floor with French doors leading out to the side garden. A computer with multiple screens maintained constant access to several internet news sites and a bank of flat panel plasma televisions were tuned to news, weather and business channels, including CNN, Bloomberg News and Fox News. A newscast was underway when he arrived and they watched it together, sipping Maker’s Mark over ice.

Anna Haynes Donaghue was 83 years old but still in very good health. She was slender and still somewhat tall, despite having lost several inches in old age, and her hair, carefully styled, was pure white. It had thinned somewhat, but Anna went to a salon every Tuesday morning where they treated her scalp with something that was supposed to preserve the follicles. She explained it once to Hank but he’d forgotten exactly what it was.

She saw her doctor every three months, practiced Tai Chi, took long walks and swam every morning in the pool. She was probably in better shape than Hank. She wore a cream-colored dress with a discreet flowered pattern, comfortable Italian shoes, a five thousand dollar watch, her wedding and engagement rings and a simple gold chain with a small cross at her neck. The veins on the backs of her hands were large and purple, and there were liver spots on the skin. Her blue eyes sparkled at him behind her glasses.

“
Forget to shave?”

Hank rubbed his cheek. “No, just trying something different.”

Anna smiled tolerantly. She’d always been closest to Hank, the youngest of her four children. A former State’s Attorney for Glendale City, she was still active in the upper echelons of the Republican Party. Her late father, Charles Goodwin Haynes, was a former Governor and her grandfather, Edward Willis Haynes, had enjoyed a prominent career as a long-serving justice of the state supreme court.

Hank got up to freshen their drinks at the bar in the corner of the room, his eye straying to the framed photographs on the wall. He smiled inwardly at a picture of his late father hanging onto a rope on someone’s sailboat at sea somewhere. Taken about twenty years ago, it betrayed Robert’s nervousness around anything deeper than a mud puddle. Born and raised in Alliance, Ohio, Robert Vernon Donaghue was the son of a physician and the grandson of a watchmaker. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University, where he attended one of the oldest law schools in the country, he moved to Maryland during the Korean War and established himself in Glendale as an up-and-coming criminal defense attorney.

He and Anna met on opposite sides of the courtroom when he defended a man accused of murdering his mistress and her young son. At that time an experienced Assistant State’s Attorney, Anna had the advantage of overwhelming circumstantial evidence and a judge who had himself been a prosecutor earlier in his career, but Robert somehow managed to obtain an acquittal despite overwhelming odds. Proud and fierce, Anna discovered she was less angry in defeat than she ought to be; she was smitten by the calm, persistent, left-leaning – and oh, yes, handsome – man who’d systematically dismantled her carefully prepared case. They were married four months later.

Beside the photograph of his seasick father was the high school graduation portrait of Hank’s oldest brother, Tom, who had left home shortly after sitting for it and never returned. He was the only Donaghue who’d ever demonstrated a talent for music. According to Anna, her maternal grandfather Charley Peach had played the cornet in a band, which was viewed by the Haynses as an eccentricity forgivable only because Charley was insanely rich as a result of his coal business, but neither she nor Robert could as much as carry a tune, let alone play a musical instrument. Tom, however, showed an aptitude and an interest from a very early age, and by the time he was five years old he was spending three to four hours a day at the decorative Steinway grand piano in the music room that no one else touched. He pestered his parents for lessons, quickly began to absorb the classics and started to compose his own little pieces. In high school he formed his own band that played weddings, dances and whatever else they could get. When he graduated he put off going to college, instead taking the bus to New York to look for work as a musician. It was a decision that changed the entire course of his life.

His number was called and he was shipped over to Viet Nam. Frightened to death, he took advantage of the ubiquity of drugs to hide from the horrors around him, ultimately becoming a heroin addict. His tour became a long, indistinct haze that ended in hospital after a speedball nearly killed him. He returned stateside and was discharged as an addict and a nervous wreck. It took him several years to get back on his feet. He played for money when he could and waited on tables and cleaned offices when he couldn’t, moving from city to city, New York to Chicago to Detroit to Los Angeles, then Denver, Minneapolis, St. Louis and Buffalo. Estranged from the family, he occasionally appeared in Glendale to play at one of the small clubs downtown. Hank never missed a performance, but they never spoke and Tom refused to have any contact with Anna.

Beneath a photograph of Anna and Mayor Darrien Watts was a studio portrait of Hank’s sister Jane with her husband and three children. Temperamentally Jane was a carbon copy of her mother, coldly rational, unforgiving of others and quick to anger. She was so like her mother, in fact, that they fought constantly, like worst enemies, perpetually at each other’s throats, neither one willing to give ground or compromise. The day that Hank watched Jane pack her things into the back of her boyfriend’s van and drive off to Columbus, Ohio to enroll at Ohio State University he’d felt more relief than anything else. There would be one less person for his mother to fight with, one less reason for the house to be filled with turmoil and anger. When Jane became a doctor Hank was initially concerned about her bedside manner with prospective patients, but when he learned that she’d chosen pathology as her career path he knew with faint relief that it was the right decision. Jane now lived in San Francisco with her family and spoke to Anna twice a year on the telephone, on her birthday and at Christmas.

As Hank screwed the cap back onto the bottle of bourbon and picked up the two tumblers from the bar, he glanced at a photograph of Robert Junior, next in age between Jane and Hank. Robert’s arm was thrown around a former Mayor of Miami-Dade County. Hank had never been any closer to Robert than he’d been to Tom or Jane. As a boy Robert had always run with his own group of friends and was seldom at home. When Hank was eight, Grandfather Haynes passed away and a sizeable chunk of his legacy went into trust funds for each of the grandchildren. It meant they were child millionaires, a concept lost on young Hank but not Robert, who’d been saving his allowance and money from odd jobs since he was ten. Robert got a part-time job as an office gofer at Grandfather Haynes’s law firm. He hung around a few of the junior partners, asking questions and listening to them talk about their cases, he spent his lunch breaks in the firm library reading law reports and made copious notes in a notebook he carried everywhere. Laconic and aggressive, he earned a law degree at Harvard and was recruited by several prominent law firms but chose to spend his first few years in practice in Grandfather Haynes’s former firm, after which he accepted a partnership in a firm in Miami that virtually controlled corporate law in that city. He was worth many millions of dollars, he’d divorced three times and had four children whom he seldom saw, he owned a yacht and a private jet and, like Jane and Tom, was a virtual stranger to Hank.

“
I wouldn’t mind a cigar,” Anna said. “Help yourself”

Hank delivered the drinks and went back for two cigars from a humidor at the end of the bar. They were Upmann lonsdales with a 42 ring size, Anna’s preferred gauge. He clipped the ends and gave one to Anna with a box of wooden matches. She struck a match and ignited the end of her cigar before putting it in her mouth. Hank lit his and settled back down in his chair, aware that his mother was watching him through a veil of smoke.

“
How’s work?”

“
The same,” Hank replied. “The hours suck, the pay is worse and all my clients are dead.”

“
I’ve heard there’s some turbulence in Chinatown right now.”

“
Where’d you hear that?” Hank asked, unsurprised.

“
Oh, I’m still connected.” She sampled her bourbon. “Be careful.”

“
Always.” Hank examined his cigar tip. His mother was stiff-necked, conservative, self-righteous and always right, but she’d never hidden her affection for her youngest.

As a boy Hank showed the quick intelligence that ran through the family, entering primary school early and achieving such high marks that he was accelerated twice in elementary school, reaching junior high at the age of nine. In his disposition he was very much like his father, quiet and patient, and as a result he was occasionally tested in the schoolyard by bullies who thought he would be easy pickings. However, he’d also inherited his father’s size and his brother Robert’s athleticism, and after a few fights the older kids decided to leave him alone. He threw himself into his studies and continued to excel, enrolling at State University as a 15-year-old freshman.

When he was sixteen his father passed away from a massive heart attack. He felt the loss deeply and buried himself in his studies. He was majoring in Criminology and Criminal Justice at his mother’s insistence. The program was new to State and largely the result of Anna’s aggressive campaigning as a member of the Board of Governors. He studied criminal law, criminal investigation, sociology, profiling, victimology, corrections and other related subjects. He completed a Bachelor’s degree and went back for a Master’s. The completion of a law degree was a logical progression and at the age of 22 Hank passed his bar exams and accepted a job in the State’s Attorney’s office. He worked for a year as an Assistant State’s Attorney, getting a feel for the job, experiencing the stresses and tensions associated with heavy case loads, noisy, distracted court rooms and exhausted, unpredictable judges. He and Marla Hennerton, another ASA, got married in a quietly-arranged civil ceremony.

He slowly gravitated toward the police officers who gathered the evidence and made the arrests in the cases he was prosecuting. He got to know them over a glass of beer after hours, asked questions about their methods and procedures and became fascinated by the job. A conversation with his mother on the subject degenerated into an argument which ended when she condescendingly told him that he sounded like his father, who could always be counted on to take the opposite of any opinion she might have on a given subject. Hank walked out of the mansion in Granger Park and applied for admission to the police academy that same day. It was a rash move, like joining the navy, and he knew it would cost him dearly in terms of career standing over the long run. But he had a strong gut feeling it was the right thing for him to do. Plus, he wanted to prove his mother wrong about a few things.