Archer Mayor - The Dark Root

“A new player,” I said quietly, as a point of fact, although it was the first I’d heard of him, too.

“No shit,” Mike muttered angrily.

Sol remained undaunted. “Who the hell’s Sonny?”

“Bad news.” Sally’s face was hard, shut down-scared, I suddenly realized.

“He in town tonight?” I asked.

“Could be. Some of his boys are.”

“Do we know them?”

She shook her head. “You will. Benny was nothin’-a free advertisement.”

“What does this Sonny want?” Sol asked, obviously frustrated at having completely missed a new development in his streets.

“Some of the action, of course,” Sally said bitterly. “He’s moving to get a gang going… Fucking chink.”

I sat forward and stared at her. “He’s Chinese?”

“I’d be pretty stupid to miss that.”

“Where’s he from?”

Sally was suddenly angry. “Jesus, Gunther-fucking China. What d’you think?”

But Mike knew what I meant. “I don’t know where he’s from-maybe the West Coast. But some of his boys’re from Montreal.”

Chief Tony Brandt stared into the bowl of his ever-present pipe. The conversation with Sally Javits and the Beauprés had triggered an intense investigation into the last days of Ben Travers, but forty-eight hours later, we still had little to go on.

“Does Sonny have a last name?”

"Not that we know of. Even the Sonny part might be bogus, as well as his actually being Chinese. That was Sally’s opinion, but she’s probably met all of three Asians in her life. Nobody else we’ve interviewed has set eyes on him, although the paranoia on the street’s making him look like Fu Manchu. Everyone’s keeping very quiet on this one.”

Tony frowned and shoved the pipe back into his mouth. He’d recently had the flu and was looking run-down. He was not in the mood for a publicity-grabbing major case. “You quoted one of the boys saying, ‘Maybe Sonny did it.’ Do we have any evidence pointing one way or the other?”

“Supposedly Sonny made a move on Benny’s drug business. A meet was arranged between principals and seconds. Everybody puffed out their chests and strutted around and Travers was dead within twenty-four hours. People drew whatever conclusion suited them.”

“But Sonny hasn’t swooped in to grab Benny’s business?”

We were sitting in Tony’s office, and he, as usual, had his long, thin frame draped along an old tilt-back office chair, his legs extending across a paper-strewn desk. The smoke from his pipe hovered like a fog bank a couple of feet above us.

“Not visibly,” I answered. “But I don’t think drugs are Sonny’s only interest anyhow. Sally told us he’d made a move on Scott Fisher’s burglary operation, and supposedly Alfie Brewster’s worried Sonny’s been hustling some of his girls. Maybe Benny overreacted to the same kind of overture and Sonny got rid of him. Or maybe he was killed because he was the toughest of the locals, and Sonny needed to set an example. There’s talk of a real gang being formed, with guns, money, and fast cars-a lot more sophisticated than the bands of kids we have roaming around here now. It wouldn’t take much to win a lot of them over.

“I’d love to chat with Sonny-just to introduce myself, if nothing else-but I was told he’s out of town, and the people he’s left behind aren’t talking.”

“They Asian, too?”

“His head lieutenant is-named Michael Vu-a graduate of the Dragon Boys gang in California. He has a rap sheet for sexual assault and extortion, but he’s clean right now. He prides himself on being inscrutable, and he’s got an ironclad alibi for when Travers went for his drive.”

Tony let out a sigh. “Sounds like he may be a dead end, at least for now.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. Tony and I had known each other for decades, and he’d been chief for much of that time. We were also close friends, so I empathized with his unhappiness. The ticking clock I’d worried about when Alice Sims approached me at the crash site had recently gotten louder. She had finally connected the hot-rodder ploy with Benny’s death, and she’d even ferreted out his name by talking to some of the same kids we’d interviewed-although not Sally Javits-so the pressure on Tony to explain a few things had suddenly become greater.

I therefore tried to give him something hopeful. “There may actually be more to this. Remember that home invasion about a month ago-Thomas Lee? I went back to the neighbor who saw a car squealing away from there just before we showed up that night. At the time, she said she knew the car wasn’t from Vermont because the plates had dark numbers on a light background. Last night, I parked opposite the Lee house and held up a variety of license plates against my own car-from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Québec-and had her stand in her window to see if any of them rang a bell. She pegged the one from Québec.”

He looked at me quizzically. “So?”

“So it was an Asian-style crime against an Asian family. That vehicle stop Marshall Smith did on the interstate in late January was a carful of Asians, all of them with contradictory stories, no luggage, an empty secret compartment on board, and heading for Montreal. And now this thing with Sonny… All Asian-related. All with ties to Montreal.”

“The vehicle stop had nothing to do with us. It was dumb luck Smith was out there.”

I conceded the point with a wave of my hand.

“I’ll go along with the other two, though,” he added. “You call Montreal?”

“They never heard of Michael Vu or any of the boys we’ve identified, and they said ‘Sonny’ is a common pseudonym. Of the hundred-and-some-thousand Asians they’ve got in their town, maybe two dozen rap sheets have that name, and they didn’t sound too interested in mailing me pictures of them.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Tony murmured. “How ’bout Thomas Lee. You speak with him after that night?”

“Yup. Still won’t talk.”

Tony removed the pipe and tapped its contents out into a large ashtray, shaking his head and looking doubly glum. “Well, until you prove otherwise, that’s all beside the point anyhow. Concentrate on nailing whoever killed Ben Travers. I’ve been stalling the press on whether this car crash was youthful high jinks gone wrong or murder, but if they get a whiff of Montreal hit teams and the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ we’ll be knee-deep in shit in no time. Who do you have working the case now?”

“Besides me, Ron Klesczewski and Sammie Martens. J.P.’s wrapping up the forensics, but that’s mostly logging whatever comes back to him from the crime lab.”

He looked slightly puzzled. “That enough people?”

“For what we’ve got to work with, yeah. Benny’s inner circle was small, and they’re all playing dumb. We haven’t even been able to track what he did between getting out of bed that morning and getting himself burned to death seven hours later.”

I got to my feet and moved toward the door.

Tony aired a possible alternative. “If I were one of Ben’s more ambitious lieutenants, hungry to grab his turf and not get caught, Sonny and his Chinese tough talk would have seemed like the perfect combination of an opportunity and an alibi.”

I paused at the door and looked back at him. “Good point.”

“Put on more people and get clear on where you’re headed. The answer to your problem may be less complicated than you think.” He patted the pile on his desk. “And this is thick enough without any race-discrimination suits added to it.”

I didn’t have long to wait for the Benny Travers case to open up slightly.

J.P. Tyler was waiting in my office, much happier than when I’d seen him last and holding a long, thin, shiny piece of twisted metal in his hand.