THE FOURTH WATCH (30 page)

“Someday somebody is gonna kill you, man,” I
told him, sliding my sandwich over in front of me and picking it
up.

"Yeah, well, you owe me five bucks for that,"
he said as I took my first bite.

''Put it on your expense report, or remain
unpaid," I told him.

"Cheap fuck," he grumbled, then returned to the
attack on his own sandwich.

We spent the next twenty minutes going over our
case. I told him about my conversations with Jed Archer and my up
coming trip to The Loading Dock's Asian outposts, about my
conversation with Louis Smyth, about my encounter with Adam Lynch
and about my visit out to Red Whorley's digs. Walter looked like
something from a horror film as he gnawed and guzzled and listened.
His office had been squeezed down to a short corridor from the door
to his desk by years of piled boxes and file folders. Filtered
light leaked in through a bank of grimy windows that looked out on
the cemetery across Canterbury Street. When he finished eating,
Walter went across the hall to the bathroom that he shared with the
other tenants on his floor and cleaned up ... sort of. He came back
rubbing his hands with a paper towel, and then he lit a long
cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. He flicked ashes in the
general direction of an over-stuffed ashtray on the corner of his
desk. How he has avoided burning this building to the ground is a
great mystery.

"So what's our theory here?" Walter asked me
when he had himself resettled in behind his desk.

Behind him, on a green worktable against the
wall, were an array of computers wired into sound equipment and
video gear. Walter is a computer nerd. As a young man, with scarce
friends and plenty of time on his hands, he was naturally drawn to
a new technology phenomenon known as the Internet. It fascinated
him from its inception and its study burned away endless lonely
hours in his life. When the Internet really took of, he gleefully
immersed himself in this anonymous virtual society that accepted
him, and let him be whomever he wished. He thrived in this layered
world of dubious reality, and he quickly learned to manipulate and
travel its passages with ease.

"Our theory is that someone is using the
Loading Dock to smuggle something into the country from China or
Taiwan or South Korea or Japan or Singapore or Thailand - or
someplace like that."

"A few someone's maybe," Walter
said.

"Yes."

"Or out of the country."

"What?"

"Or both. Smuggling something into and/or out
of the country."

"Good point," I said. The office was full of
blue smoke and yellow light. "We further theorize that Red Whorley
figured out what was going on and got himself killed for
it."

"Ah ha!"

"That was not an 'ah ha'," I said, "we knew
that, already."

"I know, but I don't get to say that enough.
How do we figure that it happened? Red getting killed I
mean."

I organized my thoughts. "Okay, Red gets
himself lured out somewhere. It's a secluded place, near the water.
Maybe it has something to do with this thing. The thing he has been
ferreting out inside his company. Or maybe whoever this Judas
friend of his is gets him out there on some other pretense, I don't
know, but he goes. When he shows up, he gets whacked on the head, a
sideways blow, by someone who knows that he has to make the blow
look like a wound that would result from a fall."

Walter was seeing it. "Okay."

"Now, like I said, this is around a body of
water somewhere. A pond, or Lake ... like that. They dunk him in
the drink. He's unconscious or immobile anyway ... and they hold
him under for a while and drown him "

"Or maybe they are only trying to half drown
him," Walter said, "because they want him to finish up in the pool,
which is probably what happened because he had chlorinated water in
his lungs."

"That's right. So now they horse him out of the
water, strip off his clothes and dress him in his sweats ... or the
clothes are at the house waiting for them and they dress him there.
There has to be at least two killers at this point because they are
going to have to drive two cars back to Baron Ridge.

"Okay, they load him into the trunk of one of
the cars ... probably their own, because if there is any kind of
investigation the next day, they don't want the trunk of Red's car
to be found full of pond water ... and they drive over to Baron
Ridge. It's about 12:30 or so when they get there because that's
about the time that Lynch is coming down the driveway after
dropping Carolyn at the front door. They drive down the service
road to the back of the barn. There has to be an insider in this,
because of the clothes thing, and because someone lets them in ...
or they have a key to the back door. They hustle Red out through
the barn ... or the garage, down the walk and slip him into the
pool. Then they go back out the way they came. One of the killers
now drives Red's car back out and around to the front of the garage
and parks the car. He ... or she ... then goes back in through the
front, locks everything up and goes out the back where the other
guy is waiting, and off they go."

Walter chewed a fingernail and looked at the
windows, visualizing it all and nodding. "Alright," he said. "So,
who have we got on this team? As a minimum we got the guy wielding
the bat or whatever it is, we got a guy on the inside of the
company, might be the same guy, I don't know, and we got somebody
with access to the keys and the clothes."

"Yes."

"And we might maybe have a cop ... maybe this
Madigan asshole, because this whole thing got closed too
quick."

I shook my head. "You know, you could be right,
but I don't like Madigan for it. I don't know, but he's not
homicide, so he really couldn't close this up. I almost believed
him when I talked to him too. I admit he has potential, he is for
sure a pecker-head, but he doesn't feel right to me, at least not
for the killing."

"First guy on the scene," Walter reminded me,
"almost like he was waiting for the call."

"Yeah, I know," I said, "and if he fits in here
somewhere else, then maybe, but ... " I shrugged, ''I don't know, I
just don't like him for it. Plus, how does a Worcester cop fit into
the rest of this?"

"Maybe whatever it is that they're smuggling
ends up over here," Walter suggested.

"Maybe."

We sat in silence for a minute, thinking.
"Okay," Walter said finally, "so what's next?"

"Let's forget Madigan, and the cop thing, for a
bit" I said. "While I'm off poking around with the import/export
guys, start running checks on all these people. Red's wife, Teddy
and his wife, the Herrera's, this Archer guy, the golf buddies,
everybody. See if anything jumps out at you. See if anyone connects
up with anyone else." I pulled a legal pad off his desk and wrote
down the names of Ray Santamano, Ernie Alacantra, Linn Tasi, Henry
Waters and Steve Talbot. "Also run these guys. These are the
company folks I'm going to see. I have no idea where they're from
so you're gonna have to get some help in the Federal warrant
management system. Tasi is probably not a U.S. citizen. You're
probably gonna need birth dates or social security numbers or
something to get anywhere. Call up Archer," I wrote his name and
number down on the pad. "Tell him I asked you to call. You might
not want to mention that you're checking him out too."

Walter looked at me sideways. "No shit," he
said.

I laughed and got up to go. "Hey, I saw an old
friend of yours in lock up the other day."

"No kiddin'?" Walter said, leaning back in his
chair, folding his hands behind his head.

"The Magnificent Missy Moooounds!" I said it
just like they do when she comes on stage down at the Titty
Canoe.

"You're shittin' me. Missy
Mountains?"

''None other."

"What a rack of antlers," Walter recalled
fondly, "did she ask for me?"

"She did not. But she said something weird," I
said, remembering the end of our conversation.

"Like what?"

"I don't know ... she asked me if I had
'troubles'. Said she'd been hearing my name around. When I pressed
her on it, she just brushed me off." I shrugged.

''Probably just a bunch of former clients of
yours, talkin' about what a piece of shit lawyer you
are."

"That's probably it."

"Anyway," Walter said, "on this other thing
I'll do some digging."

"Okay," I said, ''But watch your ass. We don't
know what we got here."

"Gee, Kato, that's awful nice of you to be
worried about me and all that, but you still owe me five bucks for
the sandwich."

"Nope, you're buying," I said. I took an
envelope from my pocket and put it down on the corner of his desk.
"It's payday. That makes us square up through the end of last
week."

"Bless your black heart, my boy!" He said
snatching up the envelope. His eyes were glistening with delight as
I left the office.

20

THE COPPER WOK
was mobbed for a Thursday night. People were packed at the
tables set off in alcoves or arranged around the boarders of the
small rooms. Patrons tramped up and down the stairs between the
first and second floors. The atmosphere was pleasant and diners,
talking among themselves, could hear each other easily above the
din. Waiters and waitresses dressed in Chinese peasants garb,
swarmed up and down the stairs between the basement kitchen and the
first and second floor dining areas, precariously balancing flaming
platters and sizzling iron skillets on out-stretched hands among
and between oblivious customers, waiting to be seated. They
chattered incomprehensibly among themselves as they went about
their work.

Carolyn and I had 7:30 reservations, but
everyone knew that, to the management of the Wok, a reservation was
nothing more than a goal to be taken into consideration. Tonight we
had been seated relatively promptly and we sat, comfortable with
each other, and watched the swirling commotion.

The Wok occupies the basement and the first two
floors of a Three-Decker on Prince Street, which is in a run down
neighborhood on a hill off Queen Street. The Three-Decker is a
style of architecture unique to New England. From 1880 until 1930
Three-Deckers were built all over the region. A large, freestanding
structure with three equal sized living quarters stacked upon one
another, the Three-Decker presented opportunity to the expanding
immigrant population that multiplied rapidly in the area during
those years. Two dynamics made this true. First was that immigrant
families tended to want to cluster together. So, for example, an
immigrant couple might live on the first floor and have their
married children occupying the two floors above them. The other
reason was that the Three-Decker afforded the immigrant a chance to
become a property owner by providing an income stream to the owner.
With relatives, or other boarders paying a modest rent for their
lodging, the owner could offset the cost of his mortgage. Many of
the largest property owning families of this day started in exactly
this manner, buying one Three-Decker, then another and then a
half-dozen more. From 1930 through 1945 not much housing was built
anywhere in America. First the country was mired in the poverty of
the Great Depression and next it was devoting all of its resources
and energy to fighting another World War. When it was all over, and
a new prosperity settled upon the land, housing tastes had changed
to the single family home. The days of Three-Decker construction
had passed, but there are still hundreds of them dotting the hills
of Worcester, and they still attract immigrant buyers.

The third floor of the Wok was occupied by the
elder Kwok's, the grizzled old Chinese couple that started the
restaurant more than fifty years ago. They represented a new class
of Chinese immigrants that flooded the country, mostly illegally,
in flight of Mao and his communist butchers, after the collapse of
the Nationalists in 1949. Mr. and Mrs. Kwok escaped with some
modest wealth and were able to put a down payment on the Prince
Street property. In the beginning, they lived on the first floor
and rented the second and third floors to relatives. The basement
they converted into a small eatery, which they ran in the evenings,
after each worked their full time jobs as domestic staff in a local
hotel during the days. Before coming to America they ran a
restaurant in their village in China, and they were skilled, and it
wasn't long before the authentic nature of their food became
popular in the local Chinese community. In time they expanded the
kitchen in the basement and converted the first floor into the
service area. They moved up to the third floor, put their children
to work and hired relatives. In the '80's their food and
traditional Chinese atmosphere attracted the yuppie crowd, and they
expanded again to the second floor, and bought a vacant lot across
the street for parking. The elder Kwok's still worked the
restaurant in their coolie garb everyday, and still lived upstairs
despite their success.

"I love the food here," Carolyn said, sipping
at a giant Mai Tai through a straw.