“With you I thought I did.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I watched you, Bosch. How you treated Mrs. Li, her son…me.”
“Oh, here we go.”
“What was it, Vietnam? You served in Vietnam, right?”
“Don’t pretend you know anything about me, Chu.”
“I know what I see and I’ve seen it before. I’m not from Vietnam, Detective. I’m an American. Born right here, like you.”
“Look, can we just drop this so we can get on with the case”
“Whatever you say. You’re the lead.”
Chu put his hands on his hips and turned back to the screen. Bosch tried to back his emotions down. He had to admit Chu had a point. And he was embarrassed that he had been so easily pegged as someone who had come back from Vietnam with a racial prejudice.
“All right,” he said. “Maybe the way I dealt with you yesterday was a mistake. I’m sorry. But you’re in now and I need to know what you know. No holding back.”
Chu relaxed too.
“I just told you everything. The only other thing I was thinking was about the two hundred sixteen.”
“What about it?”
“It’s a double payment. Like maybe Mr. Li missed a week. Maybe he was having trouble paying. His son said business was bad there.”
“And so maybe that’s what got him killed.”
Bosch pointed to the screen again.
“Can you make me a hard copy?”
“I would like one myself.”
Chu moved to the printer and pushed a button twice. Soon two copies of the image of the man turning from the counter were printing.
“Do you have mug books?” Bosch asked. “Intelligence files?”
“Of course,” Chu said. “I will try to identify him. I will make inquiries.”
“I don’t want him to know we’re coming.”
“Thank you, Detective. But, yes, I assumed that.”
Bosch didn’t respond. It had been another misstep. He was having a hard time with Chu. He found himself unable to trust him, even though he carried the same badge.
“I would also like to get a print of the tattoo as well,” Chu said.
“What tattoo?” Bosch asked.
Chu took the remote from Bosch and tapped the rewind button. He eventually froze the picture at the moment the man was reaching his left hand out to take the cash from Mr. Li. Chu used his finger to trace a barely visible outline on the inside of the man’s arm. Chu was right. It was a tattoo, but the marking was so light on the grainy image that Bosch had completely missed it.
“What is that” he asked.
“It looks like the outline of a knife. A self-administered tattoo.”
“He’s been in prison.”
Chu pushed the button to make prints of the image.
“No, usually these are done on the boat. On the way across the ocean.”
“What does it mean to you?”
“Knife is kim. There are at least three triads that have a presence here in Southern California. Yee Kim, Sai Kim and Yung Kim. These mean Righteous Knife, Western Knife and Brave Knife. They are offshoots of a Hong Kong triad called Fourteen K. Very strong and powerful.”
“Over here or there?”
“Both places.”
“Fourteen K? Like fourteen-karat gold”
“No, fourteen is a bad-luck number. It sounds like the Chinese word for death. K is for kill.”
Bosch knew from his daughter and his frequent visits to Hong Kong that any permutation of the number 4 was considered bad luck. His daughter lived with his ex-wife in a condominium tower where there were no floors marked with the numeral 4. The fourth floor was marked P for parking and the fourteenth was skipped in the way the thirteenth floor was skipped in most western buildings. The floors in the building that were actually the fourteenth and twenty-fourth contained the residences of English speakers who did not hold the same superstitions as the Han-the Chinese people.
Bosch gestured to the screen.
“So you think this guy could be in one of the Fourteen K spinoffs?” he asked.
“Perhaps yes,” Chu said. “I will begin to make inquiries just as soon as you leave.”
Bosch looked at Chu and tried to read him again. He believed he understood the message. Chu wanted Bosch out of there so he could go to work. Harry stepped over to the DVD player, ejected the disc, and took it.
“Stay in touch, Chu,” he said.
“I will,” Chu responded curtly.
“As soon as you get something, you give it to me.”
“I understand, Detective. Perfectly.”
“Good, and I’ll see you at ten with Mrs. Li and her son.”
Bosch opened the door and left the tiny room.
7
Ferras had the cash register from Fortune Liquors on his desk and had run a wire from its side into the side of his laptop. Bosch put the photo printouts down on his desk and looked across at his partner.
“What’s happening?”
“I went over to forensics. They were through with this. No prints other than the victim’s. I’m just getting into the memory now. I can tell you the take for the day up until the murder was under two hundred bucks. The victim would have had a hard time making a payment of two hundred sixteen dollars, if that’s what you think happened.”
“Well, I’ve got some stuff on that to tell you. Anything else from forensics?”
“Not much. They’re still processing every-oh, the GSR on the widow came back negative. But I guess we were expecting that.”
Bosch nodded. Since Mrs. Li had discovered her husband’s body, it was routine to test her hands and arms for gunshot residue to determine if she had recently discharged a firearm. As expected, the test came back negative for GSR. Bosch was pretty sure she could now be scratched from the list of potential suspects, even though she was barely on it in the first place.
“How deep is the memory on that thing?” Bosch asked.
“It looks like it goes back a whole year. I ran some averages. The gross income on that place was slightly less than three thousand a week. You figure in overhead and cost of goods, insurance and stuff like that, and this guy was lucky if he was clearing fifty a year for himself. That ain’t no way to make a living. Probably more dangerous down there doing what he did than being a cop on those streets.”
“Yesterday the son said business was down lately.”
“Looking at this, I don’t see where it was ever up.”
“It’s a cash business. He could have pulled money out of it in other ways.”
“Probably. And then there was the guy he was paying off. If he was handing him two bills and change a week, that would add up. That would be ten grand off the top on an annual basis.”
Bosch told Ferras what he had learned from Chu and that he was hoping the AGU could come up with an ID. They both agreed that the focal point of the investigation was shifting toward the man in the grainy printout from the store’s surveillance camera. The triad bagman. Meanwhile, the possible gangbanger who had argued with John Li the Saturday before his murder still needed to be identified and interviewed, but the contradictions between the crime scene and an anger/revenge-type killing put that lead into second position.
They went to work on the statements and other voluminous paperwork that accompanied every murder investigation. Chu arrived first at ten o’clock, making his way right to Bosch’s desk unannounced.
“Yee-ling isn’t here yet?” he asked by way of greeting.
Bosch looked up from his work.
“Who’s Yee-ling?”
“Yee-ling Li, the mother.”
Bosch realized he had not known the full name of the victim’s wife. This bothered him because it was an indication of how little he really knew about the case.
“She’s not here yet. You come up with anything over there?”
“I checked through our photo albums. Didn’t see our guy. But we’re making inquiries.”