Live Bait (23 page)

"Reid Bennett," I told him, and spelled it out. "Did the ambulance come for my partner?"

 

 

 

Chapter 27

 

 

A
ll I wanted to do was find Willis. The local police, when they came pouring into the place, were caught up in the obvious situation, two men shot and a stolen truck. They were set to plod through their investigation at the normal speed, but I was anxious to leave and go on looking for Willis. I owed him a further grudge now. Irv Goldman was a friend, and it hurt to see him suffering. I had taken a look at his wound. It was high in the shoulder, not bleeding much; possibly it had smashed his collarbone but he would recover, I was sure of it. I've seen enough bullet wounds in my time to know, but it was another reason for finding Willis.

I helped the medics load Irv on the ambulance. He was coming out of the initial shock, showing some of the chutzpah that had made him a great partner. "For this I gave up my lunch hour," he said, and winked at me. I patted him on his good arm and stood back.

"Now you owe me one," he said, pointing a finger as the doors closed on him. And then they were gone, with the siren howling, and the crowd of passersby growing thicker around us as the cars stopped on the highway and people jumped out, hoping for excitement. A second ambulance had been ordered for the two injured rounders and while it was coming, I was overlooked by the local police and I went to find Kennie again. He was holding his arm, his left hand cupped around the break, tugging impatiently on the handcuffs that connected him to Yin Chang. Chang himself was ignoring us, lying like a sick animal, not looking up, not generating any vital force at all. Even when I came and crouched next to Kennie he didn't look up. Kennie did and anger blazed in his eyes.

I said, "Where's Willis, Kennie? Tell me where he is and I'll do what I can for you in court."

He looked away, then back at me, stoking up the hatred that he would live for, back in the pen. "I shoulda shot you last night."

"Don't feel bad, it's been tried before," I said. "It's not you I want, it's Willis. Where is he, do you know?"

I waited for about thirty seconds while he stared down at the floor, then he raised his head and spat, trying to hit me in the face but his mouth was dry from shock and he just dribbled on his chin. "I wouldn't help you if it meant hangin' not to," he said.

I took out my handkerchief and handed it to him. "I admire your balls, Kennie. Where you're going, you'll need to hang tough." He wiped his mouth and gave me back the handkerchief. There was respect in his eyes, but it didn't change his mind about what he should do. Mentally he was already in the pen, telling tall tales of how he'd made me beg. I didn't begrudge him the dream. He would have very little else to groove on.

In the end I went back to the local station with the detectives. They were young and aggressive, busy playing games with one another, finishing one another's comments, laughing loud and long. They were in no hurry to take a statement from me. One of them said, "You sure seem to attract a lot of bad asses, fella."

I nodded and waited for the other Bobbsey twin to take over. "Yeah, kind of makes a guy think you may be part of this bullshit." They both laughed, hard, loud, meaningless laughter. Then the first one said, "Waddya say to that?"

That was my cue. I told them, in a very few words. "You're a pair of amateurs who ought to be out writing parking tickets. If you're not going to do anything productive, call the Metro Homicide squad. Otherwise let me out of here, you're wasting my time."

One of them said, "Now just a minute, fella," and I cut him off.

"You call me Chief or Mr. Bennett. I was a detective while your mommie was wiping your nose for you. Face up to your limitations. Let me talk to a real policeman, right away."

They blustered some more but neither one of them could meet my eyes and when clown A made a joke, clown B didn't laugh. In five minutes I was free of them, giving a statement to a sergeant who was old enough to see what was happening.

It took half an hour and then I was dropped back at my car and I sat there, trying to work out what to do next. By now Willis was listed as wanted, his description circulated by teletype and radio. Any policeman might find him and I wondered where I might look. He hadn't been at the rendezvous point. Where else did that leave? He might have headed home, but a detective would have been sitting across the street, waiting to talk to him. It made no sense to go there. But where else was there?

The only contacts I could think of were Cy Straight and Su.

At the thought that he might go back to her apartment I felt rage break over me with almost physical force. I could see her face again, dazed with horror, as it had been at her apartment and in that instant I could have killed Willis, barehanded.

I shook my head, that wasn't the answer. I had to find him and he would not be at Su's apartment. One place to look might be in the company of Cy Straight. They had something going between them, otherwise the little man wouldn't have shown at Willis's house. It was thin but I hadn't talked about Straight to the police. He was all mine, for whatever that was worth.

First I called the law office and found that Mr. Straight was not in. Fine. Next thing was to look for his private address. He must have had a clear conscience because it was in the phone book, Cyril Straight, barrister, and an address in Rosedale, which turned out to be half a million dollars' worth of house. It deserved to sit in five acres of private park, but instead was stuffed into a row of others, just the same, behind a narrow green lawn with century-old hard maples growing in it.

I parked a few doors away and considered my approach. There was no way I could bully Straight into helping. He knew the law and would stomp all over me if I started suggesting deals for help. No, it would have to be more direct, I would have to bring some moral pressure on him, coupled with a suggestion of physical threat. Basic terrorist tactics that would have made me vomit if I hadn't been looking for the man who had raped Su.

I checked the driveway as I walked up to the house. Straight's DeLorean was parked out back. He was home. The big thing was getting past the front door to see him. I rang and waited and after a moment a tall fair woman who looked as if she should be in a diamond advertisement opened the door for me. She was a step above me, which made her tall enough to look down her nose slightly. "Yes?" she said.

I was all charm, I smiled and nodded amiably. "I have an appointment with Mr. Straight. My name is Willis."

She frowned and I wondered if I'd blown it, that Willis was already inside and this would trigger her alarms. But all she said was, "He told me he wasn't to be disturbed."

"I imagine he meant during our meeting," I volunteered, and she frowned again. By the lines in her forehead she did a lot of it. "You could be right," she said in a voice you could have used to write on slate. "You'd better come in, I suppose."

I followed her, through a hallway bigger than my living room and on to a library. It had a good, used look. These books were friends, not wall paper. She went to a door in the far side and tapped. A faint voice said, "Now what is it?" in an angry hiss.

"Man called Willis, for you. Has an appointment," Her own voice hadn't changed. I could see there wasn't a nickel's worth of affection in that whole million-dollar household. No wonder the books looked so well cared for. They were all the company Straight had.

A chair scraped and the door was opened by Straight, his face eager. He saw me and tried to shut the door but I was too quick for him. "Hi, Cy, good of you to see me." I held the edge of the door and beamed a big stupid smile at his dragon lady. "Thanks ma'am. What I have to tell your husband is legal, confidential."

He was trying to speak but I overrode him as I moved into the room. "I really appreciate your seeing me at short notice, Cy." I closed the door and raised one finger at him, like an admonishing mother. "You're in real trouble."

He said, "I want you to leave," but he didn't open the door, and I knew he was whipped. I let him sweat for a moment while I looked around. The office was a copy of his downtown place, only smaller. There were a few rows of legal books but no file cabinets. On the desk were a couple of big manila envelopes. He sidled towards them as I looked around but I moved faster and picked them up. He grabbed but I just looked at him sternly and he pulled his hands back, like a greedy child caught reaching for the cookies without leave.

I glanced into the top one. It contained photographs and as I reached in to see what they were I caught a flash of pure anguish in Straight's eyes.

I pulled them out, glanced at the top one and realized what was going on. "How long has he been blackmailing you?"

He sat down behind his desk and put his hands over his face. I felt sorry for him, but that wasn't going to do anything for either of us. "How long?" I asked again, my voice toneless.

"Two years," he said through his fingers. "Ever since I went to Hong Kong. I was there for a convention. He was a police officer."

I laid the pictures down on the desk top. They were the standard stuff of blackmail, grainy, badly composed snapshots of this bent little man on a couch with a girl of about eleven, a Chinese girl. I spread them out with one fingertip. "Is pedophilia big with you?" He said nothing. I could see tears running out between his clenched fingers.

He shook his head. "Just one time," he said croakily. "It wasn't as if she was a little innocent. She was a tart. Her father sold her in infancy, I guess."

"Who took the photographs—Willis?" The rest was unimportant. The girl was ten thousand miles beyond my ability to help, an indentured prostitute in Wanchai, keeping 10 percent of her earnings, if she was lucky, another nameless casualty, out of reach. I needed Willis.

He nodded again, and then took down his hands and looked at me out of his tearstained face, like a mourner. "He got hold of them, I'm not sure whether he took them."

"He's the man I want," I said. "I'm not interested in your past. Willis attacked Yin Su this morning."

Straight flinched. "No." He mouthed it, almost silently. "No, not that."

I hate the delicious horror so many people feel about rape. They shudder but can't let go of the thought, toying with it, fantasizing about it. "She'll be fine. I took her to the hospital. Now I want to know where he is because . . ." I read the look in his eyes and I let the sentence dangle. I had been about to say, "because he's going to jail," but I could see hope in his face. I would kill Willis, would take the menace away and let him live in all the peace his handsome, hateful wife would allow him. His thoughts were vivid in his eyes.

"I don't know. He was supposed to come and see me this morning. When he didn't arrive, I went up to his house."

"Did you have money for him, what?"

Straight sniffed, a long, deliberate noisy breath that calmed him. "It's not important," he said at last.

"Look." I leaned down on both hands so my face was close to his. "Unless you help me, I'll pick up those photographs and take them down to a friend of mine who knows where to have them circulated. Now I don't want to. All I want is information, I don't want your ruin on my conscience." It was brutal but I had to know everything I could find out about Willis.

Straight made a half-hearted snatch for the photographs but I leaned my weight on them and he pulled his hand back. "I helped him with some contacts," he said quietly. "There were people he wanted to deal with, people he didn't want to reveal himself to."

"What people?" Now I was getting warm. Maybe one of these contacts knew where he was, now that he was running.

Straight took out a Kleenex and wiped his face, scrubbing it, trying to remove the tear marks. "Tony Caporetto for one."

"He's dead. Did Willis do that?"

Straight shrugged, a gesture that made his bent spine even more pitiable. "I suppose so. It said in the newspapers that he was attacked by a martial artist. That fits, Willis knew lots of Chinese. Not the usual law-abiding ones, the trouble makers, including some enforcers."

"Let's handle this the easy way." I sat down on the edge of his desk, something I knew he would hate. Office-bound people all hate it; their desks are their egos. "Suppose we stop fencing and you just tell me everything you know about Willis."

He opened his mouth and I knew he was going to make the "By what authority?" kind of speech so I tapped the envelope. He dropped his eyes, cleared his throat again and began.

"It started after I got back from the conference in Hong Kong. I was in my office, he made an appointment in the normal manner, then came in, shut the door and showed me these."

"When was that?"

"Two years ago next month. I remember because it was just one month after I got home."

"And what did he want, in return for silence?" I was filled with a hunting lust. Once I knew this man's pattern I could find him.

Straight squirmed his back. I wondered if it hurt or if he had the itchy tension that comes with interrogation. "He wanted me to work for him, making contacts with people whom he wanted to impress."

"Names?" I snapped it out but he shook his head at me. "They wouldn't mean anything to you, they were people in Hong Kong."

"Why would he have to blackmail you to get that kind of help?"

"He wouldn't have needed me if his aims had been legitimate, but they weren't. He was extorting, trying to take over a space that had grown up among the Chinese gangs in Toronto."

"You mean the Triads?" I asked impatiently.

Straight looked at me in surprise. "I'm astonished that you've heard about them. It's not common knowledge."

"Where does Willis fit in?" I kept the pressure on him, no point explaining that I'd found out about the Triads the hard way, just a day before. Let him talk. I could always go back over the facts for explanations if they were needed.

My comment didn't speed him up any. He just nodded and said, "You understand the Triads hold the real power in the community. They exist by extortion, exclusively of Chinese businesses. Their methods are similar to those used by the Mafia. They provide services such as cleaning or advertising, at extortionate rates. If you don't pay, your restaurant burns down."